POLITICS OF THE CREATURE: 

GEOLOGICAL FIGURES OF GERMAN MODERNISM 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Dissertation 

Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School 

of Cornell University 

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of 

Doctor of Philosophy 

 

 

 

 

by 

Mariaenrica Giannuzzi 

May 2023 

 

 



 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

© 2023 Mariaenrica Giannuzzi

  



 

 

POLITICS OF THE CREATURE: 

GEOLOGICAL FIGURES OF GERMAN MODERNISM 

Mariaenrica Giannuzzi, Ph. D. 

Cornell University, 2023 

 

 This dissertation examines the return of an emphatic understanding of natural 

history in German literary texts from the Weimar Republic and the post-war period. 

Natural history in these texts emerges as a paradoxical temporal scheme that allows 

for deciphering the present and divining the future by reconstructing the remote past in 

disciplines as diverse as geology, ecology, and genetics. Specifically, I survey the 

frequent references to nonhuman time embedded in philosophical and literary texts 

from the 1920s-1970s through the trope of the Kreatur: a “creaturely” condition that 

inscribes “nature” within new forms of temporality conceptualized in analogy with 

Earth's phenomena. As I argue, Modernist articulations of “the creature” propose a 

conceptual interrelation of evolutionary time, the cosmos, and political events that, in 

philosophical texts collected in the Weimar-era journal Die Kreatur (1926-1930), 

literary criticism by Walter Benjamin, and poetry by Paul Celan, describes both 

human and non-human vulnerability to catastrophic violence. As a figure of human 

dispossession whose range spans mental distress, corporeal frailty, and poverty, the 

Modernist creature offers a useful index for theorizing our temporal perception of the 

environment today. Overall, the creaturely trope functions as a means for displacing 

anthropocentric historical narratives and for offering a new perception of the 



 

environment that draws on deep geological time. Focusing on its framing through deep 

time, I reconstruct a cultural history of the creature based on the emergence of deep 

time in philosophical practices.  

  



 

 

 

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 

 

Mariaenrica Giannuzzi is a PhD candidate at Cornell University (Ithaca - NY), studying natural 

philosophy in 20th-century Europe, with a particular focus on German texts that articulate 

“creaturely aesthetics.” Her professional interests include the human/nonhuman divide, 

cosmologies, deep time, geological records, political ecology, political philosophy, feminist and 

queer theory. She graduated in philosophy at La Sapienza University in Rome in 2014, with an 

MA-thesis probing the intellectual history of German geology as it is appropriated in the 

works of Paul Celan —a research published in the journal Studi Germanici (2015)— while 

collaborating as co-organizer with the “Master in Pari Opportunità” at the University of Roma 

Tre. Mariaenrica still collaborates with several media platforms in Italy, and in the US, to 

advocate for social change. She was editorial assistant at diacritics’ editorial board; co-curator 

of IAPhItalia (the Italian website of the International Association of Women 

Philosophers), and contributor to effimera, operaviva, lavoro culturale, Italian online 

resources for social criticism. 

 

  



 

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To my mother, Flora, who has been teaching me freedom, 

and to my father, Marco, for his strength and sense of humor. 

  



 

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ACKNOWLEDGMENT 

 

 First and foremost, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my special committee 

at Cornell University that gave me the chance to question the processes, the assumptions, and the 

categories of my understanding. I want to thank Prof. Patrizia McBride for her assertions of 

tough love, asserting precision and conceptual sharpness; Prof. Karen Pinkus for her uniquely 

supportive approach to mentorship and her creative take on the writing process; and Prof. Paul 

Fleming, often asking for more because there was more that I could do. Lasting thanks are owed 

to them for teaching self-orientation above all, but not secondarily, for supervising this 

dissertation mostly developed in between frequent language gaps. Some of these gaps were more 

structural than others, like the gaps, or better, dead-ends and resulting adjustments that come 

from operating in two foreign languages in a transdisciplinary field —a fact always reopening 

the question of the difference between what I want to say and what I can say in given forms of 

speech. Like language as such, these forms remain never fully appropriated (or appropriate?). 

Some other gaps, instead, were related to the unfinished nature of a work in progress. For the 

patience in supervising this yearlong, sometimes difficult and impulsive, other times just 

confusing, razzmatazz of my drafts, I thank my committee.  

 Second, I want to thank the research community in Ithaca, NY. Without the consistency 

of shared research habits, this dissertation would have never seen the light. Therefore, I would 

like to thank the following people, without whom I would not have been able to complete this 

project, and with whom I spent the best hours of my PhD program. I must acknowledge the 

attention, generosity, and love, with which my peers and travel companions contributed to my 



 

 8 

work in conversations, reading groups, editing nights, study-ins, and dinner parties: for these 

things, I want to thank Juan-Jacques Aupiais, Søren Larsen, Tamar Gutfeld, Aki Sommer, 

Michael Cary, Seth Strickland, Rocío Corral Garcia, Pascal Schwaighofer, Ege Okal, Daniel 

Friedman, Kyle Armbrust, Valeria Dani, Gianluca Pulsoni, Nora Siena and Hannes Bajohr. But 

so many, so rich and enriching, have been the encounters in Ithaca that I also must excuse myself 

for the modesty of this list. I would like to thank at least Jacy Tackett and the members of the 

“Human/Nonhuman Dissertation Writing Group” funded by the Society for the Humanities in 

2020-21, as well as the PhD-Net in Berlin (in particular, for the exquisite office at Luisenstraße 

57 and, less formally, for the unforgettable evenings at the “Fuchsbau” on Planufer). Dear thanks 

go to Florian Scherübl, Anna Hordych, Jasmin Köhler, Endre Holéczy and Jake Fraser. More 

thanks go to the thinkers of the 2020-22 ICI cohort and their extended families. Also, more 

thanks go to Claudia Giannuzzi, Flavio D’Abramo, Fabio and Laura Migliano, Vincenzo 

Prencipe, and all the wonderous humans facing ordinarily odd winters in Berlin.  

 My gratitude and appreciation also go to the precious interlocutors that made this project 

possible. I am essentially indebted to conversations with Prof. Geoffrey Carter Waite, Prof. 

Federica Giardini, and Prof. Timothy Campbell, who supported my research in the early phase of 

my PhD, as well as to the feminist action-research group EcoPol (Political Ecology/Economy, 

Rome 2014-17).  

I will never acknowledge enough how always significant the conversations with historian 

of science Prof. Alessandro Ottaviani are, and how vital the cross-pollinations with the research 

of Prof. Camilla Miglio are. At last, I want to thank Prof. Eva Geulen as a sponsor of the One-

Year DAAD Research Grant 2021-22 at the Humboldt University, and mentor, above all, for her 

tension to empiric research in history and critical vigilance in philosophy. For similar reasons, 



 

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and the kind mentorship, I must thank Prof. Andrea Pinotti, who granted this project access to 

the marvelous activities of the AN-ICON research group (Immersivity and Environmental 

Image) at La Statale University in Milan, where I was a visiting researcher over my Sage Year, 

for which I still thank Cornell University’s Graduate School. 

  

  



 

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TABLE OF CONTENTS 

 

 

PREFACE          12 

 

INTRODUCTION         21 

 

CHAPTER 1 

DIE KREATUR (1926-1930), A PROJECT OF NON-THEOLOGY 

 

1.1. Lapidarium. On Natural History as Morphology   48 

1.2. Edgar Dacqué’s Morphology     55 

 1) Urform and Type      58 

 2) Urform as Myhtos      68 

 3) Die Ursinnessphäre     69 

1.3. Which Lebensphilosophie?      80 

 

 

CHAPTER 2 

WALTER BENJAMIN’S STATE(S) OF CREATION 

 

 2.1. Planetarium. From the Sublime to the Cosmic     

  1) Technology and Vision      99 

  2) Creature and Human Condition     112 

  3) Creature and Natural Laws     118 

 2.2. Kreatürlicher Zustand: the Stage of the Trauerspiel   

  1) Temporality and History      121 

  2) Closed Temporality/Finite Cosmos   128 

 2.3. Benjamin’s “Krisis des Darwinismus”    136 



 

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CHAPTER 3 

PAUL CELAN’S TEXTSCAPE 

 

 3.1. Creaturely Tracks. Natural History and Ius Soli    142 

  1) The Density of Names     146 

  2) Naturally Displaced     150 

  3) Medusa’s Head      161 

 3.2. After the Landscape. Atomisierung and Atomic Energy   

 1) Microliths, Ephemeral Structures, Raumgitter   170 

  2) Posthuman        176 

 3.3. Terrarium, Terrae      181 

 

WORKS CITED        192 

 

  



 

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PREFACE 

 

 

Marktschrei[er] von einer Bude: Meine Herren! Meine Herren! Sehn sie 

die Kreatur, wie sie Gott gemacht, nix, gar nix. Sehen Sie jetzt die Kunst, 

geht aufrecht hat Rock und Hosen, hat ein Säbel! Ho! Mach 

Kompliment! So bist brav. Gieb Kuß! Er trompete[t]. Michl ist 

musikalisch. Meine Herren hier ist zu sehen das astronomische Pferd und 

die kleinen Kanaillevögele. Ist favo[r]i von allen gekrönten Häuptern. 

Die rapräsäntation anfangen! Man mackt Anfang von Anfang. Es wird 

sogleich seyn das commence[me]nt von commence[me]nt.1 

Büchner, Georg. Woyzeck. I, I (DKV 2006, 177). 

 

 This dissertation examines German texts from the Weimar Republic and the post-war 

period that dramatize the trope of die Kreatur. Kreatur is untranslatable. Like Barbara Cassin’s 

intraduicibles it aggregates cross-cultural and cross-linguistic complexities that require a 

Kulturgeschichte.2 The cultural history attempted in this dissertation traces the “invention” of 

 
1 [[Market shouts] from a booth: Gentlemen! Gentlemen! See the creature as God made it, nothing, 

nothing at all. See now art, it walks upright, has a skirt and pants, has a saber! Oh! Congratulations! 

You're so good. Kisses! Trumpets. Mich[ae]l is musical. Gentlemen, here you can see the astronomical 

horse and the small scoundrel birds. They are the favorite of all crowned heads. Start the representation! It 

is called the beginning of the beginning. It will start immediately: the commencement of all 

commencements!]. Where not otherwise specified all translations are mine.  
2 Cassin, Barbara. Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon, Princeton University Press, 

[2014] 2017. Kreatur/creature is a modern synonym of the Germanic word Geschöpf [creation, 

production] but “stronger and more sonorous” than Geschöpf, because the meaning of Kreatur oscillates 



 

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deep time through the trope of the creature genealogically and by relying on extensive archival 

research, while also delineating a new conception of the German trope of “die Kreatur” 

(“creature”): a trope that indexes vulnerability to socio-political as well as natural events. 

Specifically, I focus on the momentous changes the trope of Kreatur undergoes in texts ranging 

from the Weimar Republic to the post-World-War-II period, as the meaning of the trope shifts 

from its original status as an exclusionary slur to a new figure of vulnerable subjectivity that 

potentially resets humans’ fundamental relation to time and space, history, and the lived 

environment.  

The trope’s complexity is evidenced by its evolving, stacked meanings. In the first place, 

Kreatur is traditionally meant to belittle and patronize, to judge someone naïf; or, worse, not 

structurally capable of rational thinking and action. Secondly, Kreatur/creatureliness performs 

“an oscillation between the ‘natural’ and the ‘supernatural’” (Weidner 2010) that embeds 

humankind in both natural history and the Christian history of salvation. This is the case for texts 

that are central to the dissertation and the philosophical articulation of the trope, ranging from 

Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duineser Elegien (1916) to Walter Benjamin’s Ursprung des Deutschen 

Trauerspiels (1928), as these constitute the genealogy of the new Kreatur/creature, which, as I 

argue, emerges when deep time (as an articulation of natural-historical temporality with modern 

technology) takes place at the center of philosophical inquiries. Thirdly, by addressing liminal 

forms of being like automatons, ghosts, or the undead, “the creature” blurs the division between 

 
between “being created (by God)” and “being an instrument of another man,” (cf. DWB = Deutsches 

Wörterbuch von Jacob und Wilhelm Grimm. 16 Bde. in 32 Teilbänden, Leipzig [1854-1961], 1971, p. 

639). During the Enlightenment the meaning of Kreatur shifts from the theological ens creatum (by God) 

to the deistic, theistic, or atheist meaning of non-created by humans, hence natural, as the dictionary by 

Joachim Campe defines it (cf. DWB, p. 640).  



 

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the living and the dead. These liminal forms of existence identified as Kreatur in the everyday 

language as well as in literature embody the suspension of a primarily theological function 

(createdness, being created by God’s will) and the subsequent invention of a new subject that 

draws on natural history to gain experiences of the human condition. The human condition here 

denotes a lack of autonomous agency, indeed, a condition of being at the mercy of 

circumstances. This connotation produced a political reading of Weimar-era literature that 

identified die Kreatur as the leftover of workers’ emancipation: the human refuse excluded from 

socialism (Lethen 1994). It is the creature’s paradigmatic exclusion from the socio-political 

agency, however, that gives rise to its inclusion in profane natural histories. In the 1920s this 

excluded, wretched life, of the creatures, which is close to the inanimate and the dead, is 

increasingly described —and increasingly describes herself— through literary appropriations 

from the natural sciences. To the extent these appropriations delineate a new subject of history, 

and hence the future of the creature beyond religion and socialism, we can understand Modernist 

natural histories as narratives of body/environment relationality. The articulation between the 

collective body and the environment comes to replace the centrality of both the individual 

relationship with God and class relations.  

The broader stakes of this dissertation comprehend a revisitation of the German trope 

from the standpoint of today’s creaturely life, or the irrevocable loss of biodiversity caused by 

ecologically disruptive lifestyles (cf. Chakrabarty, “livability” Conference, Fondazione Ratti, 

Oct. 22nd, 2022). The relational, rather than exclusionary, paradigm of the creature that I propose 

above all by diving into Weimar-era texts responds to the need to define and articulate creaturely 

life: new affective and political bonds grounded in the mutual exposure to both ecological 

disruption and deep-temporal changes that embed agency in technological artifacts.  



 

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Throughout this dissertation, I track the transformations that the theological trope of the 

creature underwent in conversation with natural science, especially, natural history. As I show 

through a selection of texts primarily collected in the journal Die Kreatur (1926-1930)3 and 

writings by Walter Benjamin and Paul Celan, the theological concept of the creature or created 

humanity develops in two directions: politicization and narrativization. First, the signifier of the 

creature undergoes a process of politicization, whereby Jewish intellectuals reclaim it from its 

late-nineteenth-century derogatory use, although in parallel with an increasingly derogatory use 

within communist milieus (cf. Lethen [1994]2002). Second, the trope of the creature undergoes a 

process of narrativization, as the creature becomes the protagonist of natural and cultural 

histories (cf. Die Kreatur; Benjamin 1928; Jesi 2002). These “natural” narratives of the creature 

often condense geological imaginaries that have already offered operative metaphors like 

sedimentation and mineralization for psychoanalysis to theorize the “inorganic.” 4 Manifestations 

of inorganic life to the subject of experience hint at traumatic events, before the psychological or 

the trauma itself, is subsumed in a “type” (the traumatized, the excluded, the creature). 

Furthermore, references to natural histories performed with the trope of the creature reveal the 

“geosocialities” or “the alignment between geology and social-cultural theory” (Palsson-

Swanson 2016), because the writing practices that respond to, or are exposed to, political 

 
3 For a medial description of the journal see Zimmermann, Hans Dieter (editor). Die Kreatur. Anthologie 

einer ökumenischen Zeitschrift. Dreieck 2003, and Frank, Gustav. “Die Kreatur und Walter Benjamins 

Periodika-Netzwerk der 20er Jahre. Neue Zugänge der Zeitschriftenforschung,” In Naharaim, 2019; 13(1-

2): 29–72, pp. 30–31. 
4 Cf. Freud Sigmund, Jenseits des Lustprinzips, Leipzig 1920. For further reference see De Filippis, 

Valentina–Vizzardelli, Silvia. La tentazione dello spazio. Estetica e psicoanalisi dell’inorganico. 

Orthotes, 2016. For a genealogy of the “inorganic” as an aesthetic mark of German modernity see 

Hottner, Wolfgang. Kristallisationen. Ästhetik und Poetik des Anorganischen im späten 18. Jahrhundert. 

Wallstein, 2020. 



 

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violence like these considered in the dissertation not only engage with a literary (fictional) 

understanding of natural history, its metaphors, analogies and allegories. They also present an 

epistemological preoccupation toward natural history as human-made history. The texts selected 

hence function as a translation machine (Tsing, 2015) between scientific knowledge and literary 

texts that report experiences of “ban” (meaning marginalization and social exclusion, but also the 

presence of an ecstatic potential, the position of staying with a limit, with a divide).  

 To frame geological figures of the creature5 I am indebted to Helmut Lethen’s 

theorization of the Weimarer cultural climate. This debt also involves the quest for a further 

Auseinandersetzung (a positional battle, if I may), because the political polarization between 

communitarianism and liberalism Lethen finds in the literature of the Republic cannot account 

for an important political position, namely, pluralism, documented and theorized in the journal 

Die Kreatur. Also, Lethen’s reconstruction of die Kreatur as a literary trope of social exclusion 

that divides the organized working class from the unorganized outcasts cannot account for the 

reception, in fact, the deconstruction of the trope, within Jewish literary discourse after WWII, as 

it emerges in the poetological discourse of Paul Celan, and as it can emerge today, as that 

philosophical project to theorize the diffraction of deep time onto the surface of the mind, and 

yet, within the field of language.    

This dissertation comprises an introduction and three chapters. The introduction  

surveys and assesses the valences of the creature trope as discussed in the secondary literature, 

from Lethen’s reconstruction to Giorgio Agamben and Eric Santner; outlines the philosophical 

problem of deep-temporal causality; and identifies the creature as a concept for the emergence of 

 
5 By “figure” I mean a linguistically articulated concept depending on an empiric context and the 

cognitive process in which it emerges.  



 

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deep time with reference to morphology (as the distinctive epistemic framework German 

speaking-thinkers used to investigate nature between WWI and WWII). 

As already mentioned, the theological concept of the creature or created humanity 

developed in two directions: politicization and narrativization. The trope undergoes a process of 

politicization during the Weimar Republic, whereby Jewish intellectuals reclaim it from its 

everyday derogatory use, and in parallel to an increasingly critical use within communist milieus 

(cf. Lethen 1994). Literary examples of this contradiction are the novel Die Kreatur (1925) by a 

communist doctor and future East German ambassador to Poland Friedrich Wolf, the 

Expressionist play Die Kreatur: Schauspiel in drei Akten (1930) by Ferdinand Bruckner, at last, 

Franz Blei’s erotic novella Die Lust der Kreatur (1931) —little-studied texts that deserve further 

analysis to shed light on the exclusionary logics of race, gender, and class in the context of post 

WWI Germany that unfortunately exceed the “geological” triangulation of this dissertation 

revolving around figures of deep time, political violence and cosmic/cosmological discourse. 

Second, the trope of the creature undergoes a contemporary process of narrativization, as the 

creature becomes a protagonist of cultural histories (Jesi 2002; Santner 2006) and the critical 

embodiment of the division between human and animal (Agamben 2002). Following these two 

transformations, my study addresses the presence (or absence) of a geological index (a reference 

to the inanimate, or de-animated), as it interrogates the trope from the perspective of bridging not 

only a human/animal divide, but also a human/nonhuman or living/nonliving divide. These 

additional partitions are thrust into view when the texts at stake posit the problem of thinking 

time in non-chronological ways. At issue is, on the one hand, a temporality of formation, 

articulated, for instance, by biological processes that frame time as “anticipation and 

supplement” (Weizsäcker 1942), or “epigenesis” (Malabou 2016) —both expressions translating 



 

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a teleological drive of a living form, which proceeds by actualizing a form according to a 

formative plan, while also changing the plan according to the new form. On the other hand, deep 

time also emerges as a mode of scattered evolutionary temporality, i.e., “Buschwerk,” the thicket 

of German geological morphology in contrast to the “tree of life” of Darwinism (Dacqué 1929); 

also, deep time emerges as a “state of creation” (Benjamin 1928) and a radically contingent, 

“planetary,” temporality performed by creaturely encounters (Celan “The Meridian”). After 

showing that these conceptions of deep time displace anthropocentric historical narratives of the 

creature, the Introduction that follows redefines the philosophy of the environmental subject as a 

pathway to think about the entanglement of natural history, deep time, and “the creature”, that is, 

the human condition captured through technology to configure temporality as a non-humanist 

mode of representation. 

After describing the scope and stakes of the dissertation in the Introduction, the first 

chapter “I. DIE KREATUR (1926-1930): A PROJECT OF NON-THEOLOGY” examines how 

Weimar-era ‘heretical’ takes on theological concepts blurred the boundaries between mysticism 

and scientific, namely epistemic, pursuits, whether Geist- or Naturwissenschaft. The chapter 

describes the journal’s minimalistic theology specifically centered on Kreatürlichkeit or 

creatureliness: “the pathic/passive conception of the body (Leib) understood as a visible 

expression of the soul” (Braungart 1995, cit. in Frank 2019); or, as in the avant-gardist 

formulation, as an expression of “life fluxes” (Béla Balázs 1924, Ibid.). I argue that through the 

minimalistic theology of the journal and in conversation with new philosophies of time (Edgar 

Dacqué’s geological morphology, Walter Benjamin’s reception of Dacqué’s work, Weizsäcker’s 

and Whitehead’s re-elaboration of the concept of time) the journal offers chances to conceive of 



 

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human passivity (exposure and submission to extra-human phenomena) as a fundamental 

element of the human/nonhuman entanglement.  

In the second chapter “II. WALTER BENJAMIN’S STATE(S) OF CREATION” I trace 

Walter Benjamin’s use of the motif of the creature, which emerges in his notes on Goethe’s 

morphology as well as in two texts published in 1928 and written in parallel, although in 

completely different forms: the experimental aphorism book Einbahnstraße (1928) and the 

treatise Ursprung des Deutschen Trauerspiels (1928). In both texts, the creature is a site for the 

critique of the modern subject, i.e., the free (Kantian) individual who is independent of nature, 

while advancing an alternate understanding of the human condition predicated on the idea of 

human “species” forged in an ethical engagement with the environment (cf. “Zum Planetarium”). 

The species is a form of collective nature, which results from techniques of configuration: either 

the contemporary multitude subjected to cosmic forces in ecstatic phenomena of trance, as 

experienced in World War I (Einbahnstraße), or the anachronistic subjection to static, 

unchangeable, forces of pre-modern and early-modern natural history, as on the stage of Baroque 

theater dissected in Ursprung des Deutschen Trauerspiels. 

The third chapter “III. PAUL CELAN’S TEXTSCAPE” tackles Paul Celan’s linguistic 

appropriations from scientific lexica and books of natural history (Werner 1998; Tobias 2006; 

Miglio 2022) to trace Celan’s deconstruction of ethnicized and mystifying discourses of nature 

back to specific models of natural history. In contrast to an allegedly natural alignment of 

identity and place (of birth, of citizenship, like in conservative notions of belonging such as the 

doctrine of the Lebensraum), Celan revisits the trope of the creature as a language “under the 

angle of inclination of creatureliness.” This “angle” of language is geodetical: it renders the 

amplitude of existence depending on the geomorphic and geopolitical situation of the speaker. 



 

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The language of the textscape hence delineates a linguistic landscape through poetic geography, 

which is geographic poetry as well. As I have shown elsewhere (Giannuzzi 2015), this 

geodetical, existential, angle condenses Celan’s familiarity with some natural histories —from 

Mutual Aid by Gustav Kropotkin to Abriß der Geologie by geologist Roland Brinkmann— that 

explicitly oppose social Darwinism.  

 Throughout Celan’s ‘textscapes’ in Sprachgitter (1959) my research moves on to 

interpret his natural philosophy in Die Niemandsrose (1963) as a planetary practice of grafting 

the landscape in the text “In der Luft”. I subsequently examine the reduction of writing to the 

techno-natural composition of matter (cf. “In der Blasenkammer” in Lichtzwang, 1970), or its 

atomic and anomic —in one word, geological— composition (cf. “Ortwechsel” in Zeitgehöft, 

1976). Reading these texts alongside the results from the previous chapters, I argue that Celan’s 

texts offer new profane myths of creation in which a new proclivity to the nonhuman replaces 

anthropocentric figures of the creature traditionally constrained by ‘human-first theology’. 

 

  



 

 21 

 

 

INTRODUCTION 

 

 

The Creature: an Exclusionary Paradigm 

 

To illustrate how new “politics of the creature” rearticulated the trope of Kreatur over the 

Weimar Republic and track a change in its function (from exclusionary slur to a new figure of 

vulnerable subjectivity that potentially resets humans’ fundamental relation to time and space, 

history and the lived environment via reference to the nonhuman), we should revisit Helmuth 

Lethen’s formulation of the trope. A social figure under extreme remote control, the creature 

embodies for Lethen a Lebensversuch (197): a leap, an attempt to live, and a failure to do so. 

Under this literary “type” of the creature Lethen understands the practical behaviour of the 

apolitical, together with another model of failure: the cold person (kalte Person). These two 

types of conduct track the impossible access to ethics throughout Weimar-era literature. Far from 

reaching the plenitude of an existential and/or socialist form of life, these moral types are either 

antisocial individuals (the cold person), or super-victims of organized violence (the creatures). 

Both forms of neglecting ethics represent to Lethen the disenfranchisement of German citizens 

confronted with the choice between communitarianism and liberalism.  

Lethen’s thesis in the milestone Verhaltenslehren der Kälte (1994) is hence that between 

World War I and II, a culture of distance valorized anonymity against totalitarian cults of 

Gemeinschaft, but this valorization remained an attempt. Since “leading a life in alienation is an 



 

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art,” normal individuals only developed “cold” social games of “proximity without violation” 

(Ibid.), in fact evading —hot— questions on the relationality of the political body. To him, the 

creature is one of the tropes that perform individual indifference, which I interpret as the game of 

deferring exclusion by pushing a stigma further on, upon other and more vulnerable individuals 

—something the literature Lethen considers can also show:  

 

Twentieth-century social schemata barely define the creature. But now it appears as a 

figure under extremely remote control, unlike the vagabond, who is untethered, or the 

anarchist, the last refuge of the individual conscience. No inner regulator is in place. As a 

rule, the twentieth-century creature is forced to sublimate drives through brute force or in 

some kind of asylum. It achieves discipline only in stable environments like the military. 

Its capacity for rationality is strongly qualified by a tendency to think magically, in 

images (Ibid.).  

 

 If we read closely, the creature as Lethen intends it is the mark of human animalization 

disseminated through the grotesque, somehow ‘subhuman,’ characters of Weimer-era novels and 

reportages written by politicized authors, including Zweig, Döblin, Brecht and Kracauer. In the 

literature of the New Objectivity, mostly based in Berlin, which is Lethen’s main corpus to 

define the non-activist figure of the creature, external circumstances beyond control give rise to a 

form of heteronomy that Lethen defines as “a sense of inescapable destiny [which] answers the 

ambition of being history’s agent” (198). Historical creatures of this kind are tragic without 

redemption: 

 



 

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Prominent creatures of the new objectivity decade are Brecht’s infanticide Maria Farrar 

and the parricide Jakob Apfelböck; Döblin’s Franz Biberkopf; Arnold Zweig’s Sergeant 

Grischa; Joseph Roth’s Hiob; Robert Musil’s Moosbrugger; and Ludwig Turek’s Brother 

Rudolf, already dying in his crib, failing even to achieve the status of creature. The great 

achievement of proletarian literature of these years was to sever the worker’s image from 

the creature’s, at the price of moving the worker closer to the cool persona (Ibid). 

 

 In Lethen’s history, the emancipation of the figure of the worker from anarchists and 

asylum seekers did not occur without turbulence. The creature is this turbulence. It is the 

trademark of the transition of the workers to modern respectability —their leftovers, their 

scapegoats. The corpus Lethen selects to illustrate the turbulent edges of the working class 

includes Zweig’s Grischa, Kracauer’s newspaper reports, and Bronnen’s traffic novel OS. All 

these texts characterize a crisis in the narrative forms of realism. The prospectus of Zweig’s 

Grischa, for instance, irritated Brecht, for identifying with the psyche of a man condemned to 

death was senseless for the constitution of class conscience. The novel entailed a dangerous 

appeal for mercy to constituted authorities, legitimizing them. That history and reality are no 

longer communicating vessels is suggested when Lethen couples Brecht and Benjamin: “Brecht 

is at one in this judgment with Walter Benjamin, who remarks that in dramatic tragedy the ‘trial 

of the creature’ as a protest against death is at the end ‘only halfway processed and shelved’” 

(202). This “being at one” is itself a divergence between two orders of reality: the historical 

creature, which is linguistically articulated, and the use of allegorical images. The Kafkaesque 

image of man before the law structures the comparison, and even literary theory, here, is forced 

to think cryptically. And yet, Lethen finds proof in Zweig’s novel of how the creature functions 



 

 24 

only in the artificial group, for instance, in the army. What he calls “the war cripple” is a 

descendant of Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck, which was a Jacobin drama that told the story of a 

wigmaker who joined the military and became the murderer of his lover without any reasonable 

explanation, but also, without visible signs of madness. 

 After institutional domestication, as in the case of lieutenant Grischa, “critical differences 

between human and animal life fall away” (203). This also happens in another exemplary case, 

Tat und Täter, a reportage by Sigfried Kracauer published in July 1925, which portrayed the 

uxoricide Fritz Angerstein, and, to a certain extent, justified his deeds. So wrote Kracauer: 

 

What happened according to him? Well, petit-bourgeois Angerstein with the apparently 

easy-going nature must have had to repress mountains of dissatisfactions and worries. It 

is easy to imagine: the hysterical wife, who wants to be protected and cared for, with her 

dark biblical fantasies and complexes of her own; the need to keep them secret. Psychic 

dynamite piles up, while the container holding it looks fine. One day the story explodes 

—with a bang, impulses break through inhibitions (208). 

 

 The unconscious life manifests in an eruption of unbridled nature. In Kracauer’s 

narrative, according to Lethen, “the creature is the mask that must be relied upon to avert the 

threat of death” (209). And the mask is so fragile, that it can break at any impulse. It is more an 

inhibitor of the id than a habit or conduct. The perpetrator struggles with the inauthenticity of his 

social context —whereby hysteria and religious fervor of the murdered spouse is taken as given. 

The end of the reportage is equally striking. “Only in a humane world does the deed have its 



 

 25 

doer,” writes Kracauer. This strategy of cold conduct, in which “creature” is the unstable mask of 

the id, almost forces psychoanalysis into a dead end of unaccountability. 

 Lethen’s topology resumes with Bronnen’s novel OS (one of the favorites of Ernst 

Jünger, 210). The creature has a name, Johan Schramm, “a Tyrolean roadworker from Sterzing, 

who had devoted himself on the Italian front to wiping out ‘138 sons of this only distant human 

tribe,’ in order to get hold of their cans of tuna and ground meat” (Ibid). In this traffic novel, 

Schramm will keep missing the train at every station in which it stops, and so he tries to board 

disparate vehicles. In his speech, any inside turning outward is the same as the outside world, a 

machinelike essence: “There is nothing speaking in me Herr Ulitza, but my vocal cords, of 

course with the help of my teeth. Otherwise, we can talk about anything you like, just not 

slowing down” (212.) Here, speech is “a weapon talk.” And the transition of the creature from 

the man in need of social mercy to behavioral automation is finally achieved. 

 Summarizing Lethen’s point, for the literature of the time politically undecisive creatures 

divided between the State and individuality did not respond to their will. Their will is spatialized 

in disciplinary institutions, like Grischa’s, or fragmented into an innate psychic conflict, as in the 

Argenstein case reported by Kracauer. The intended games of “proximity without violation” are 

ultimately precluded, and the “cold project” of liberalism clashes against the lack of social 

processes that would elaborate negative passions. Observing the strange art of individual 

adaptation to inequality in the frames of realism, Lethen challenged John Rawls’ formulation of 

society as an open system of unencumbered strangers. Playing Helmut Plessner’s negative 

anthropology against Rawls’ liberalism, Lethen measured trauma and passions such as hunger, 

longing, and eros on the scale of legality. Drawing conclusions from his argument, State legality 

did not offer ways (neither material nor spiritual sites) to elaborate violent affects in the sense of 



 

 26 

social coexistence. As the case of the journal Die Kreatur will show, however, this is not 

completely true. There were experiences of pluralism, inquiries on negative affects, and even 

conflictive positions within the same editorial project. These were engaged with the task of 

collecting transdisciplinary forms of research and communication, rather than with literary 

realism. And these were sites to elaborate violent passions, from fear to the erotic attraction to 

the leader, including forms of connection to the non-human through discredited traditions, such 

as mysticism and natural history.  

 While Lethen’s study around the trope of the creature analyzes Weimar-era forms of 

realism that track social exclusion, political theology has reformulated the meaning of the trope 

of the creature in literary discourse. Creaturely life becomes a secularized natural theology 

echoing legal dynamics in a state of siege like in Giorgio Agamben’s The Open (2002) —to 

which I will come soon; it becomes a mortal form of life, disjoined from an immortal body that 

represents sovereignty like in Ernst Kantorowicz’s The King’s Two Bodies (1957). In Lethen’s 

framework, nothing like an insurgency of the theological throughout the political recalls the 

figure of the sacrificial creature, nuda vita —Agamben valorizing “bare” life as in Hannah 

Arendt’s genealogy of Jewish statelessness between the wars in The Origins of Totalitarianism 

(1949). For Lethen the creature remains a figure of structural social exclusion, but it does not set 

the discursive boundaries of the legal and the extra-legal as in Agamben’s important contribution 

to the cultural history of the trope. In the first case —realism— literature mirrors, or critiques, 

processes that are primarily social and historical dynamics; in the second case —political 

theology— language performs, produces, and hence rearticulates social processes through 

apparatuses and techniques. As a mirror of an exclusionary paradigm, the creature represents 

men in need of mercy, “objects in need of social solicitude” (Lethen [1994]2002, 204). It 



 

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identifies figures of failure that cannot align with the process of workers’ emancipation. The 

linguistic form of the creature hence formalizes conducts with stigmatized individuals, 

individuals that are considered to be more animal, more driven by necessity, or more subjected to 

the violence of theological dogmas. Compared to normal individuals, creatures are the super-

victims of social structures, and that is why Lethen’s interpretation of the creature constitutes the 

frame for blurring the human/non-human divide only by the collapse of individuality into 

disciplinary organizations that take up the care of bare life, or the life of individuals who do not 

embody sovereignty.  

 Lethen’s framework remains true for literary works that are less known, or unknown, and 

yet, that actively engaged with the inventio of the trope of the creature as a socially anomic 

(unreasonable, unskilled, naïf) subject. These are texts produced by writers with an intense 

political commitment. To this trend belong aforementioned texts such as: the novel Die Kreatur 

(1925) by Friedrich Wolf, Die Kreatur. Schauspiel in drei Akten (1930) by Ferdinand Bruckner, 

and Franz Blei’s Die Lust der Kreatur (1931). I have researched these texts but decided not to 

include them in this dissertation focused on how “deep time” (extra-human time) is performed 

with the trope of the creature. The complexity and historical relevance of this further ‘creatural 

literature’6 that I perhaps ‘discovered’ let me think it deserves a study per se, which I am willing 

to develop in a book project.  

 
6 Under the pseudonym of Theodor Tagger, Bruckner was the co-founder of the “Renaissance-Theater” in 

Berlin, and later house-dramaturg of the Schillertheater; Blei was editor at the literary magazines Die 

Insel, Hyperion (in which Franz Kafka debuted) and Der Querschnitt, for which he published literary 

criticism and essays on pornography. Blei was also translator of Edgar Allan Poe, Oscar Wilde, Walt 

Whiteman, André Gide, and others —a Modernist constellation Helga Mitterbauer defines as “the 

network Blei” (Mitterbauer 2003). The literary works produced by Wolf, Bruckner, and Blei refer to “the 

creature” in their title but could not be more disparate in terms of political and aesthetic positions. But it is 



 

 28 

 As already noticed, Lethen’s framework cannot comprehend narrative experiments that 

advocate neither for communitarianism, nor for liberalism, but rather for pluralism, like the 

journal Die Kreatur (1926–1930), which is the focus of the first chapter of this dissertation. 

Pluralism has been convincingly examined by Birgit R. Erdle as a three-folded ideal inspiring the 

political project of the journal: a practice of coexistence, of public use of language and, overall, 

of ethical Vielfältigkeit (multiplicity, cf. Erdle, In Naharaim 2019, 20). Creaturely coexistence 

meant “to prove possible how to work together in praxis” (Erdle 2019, 16); this was a praxis of 

conditions-making for the public use of speech: “to make visible the conditions of the language 

of Jewish-Christian public space” (Ivi, 18). All these aspects were very important to reclaim the 

creature as a signifier of liberation during the Weimar Republic. By reclaiming a signifier of 

exclusion and subverting it through a multi-disciplinary experiment the journal Die Kreatur still 

helps understand politics as a linguistic practice, namely, as a practice of reclaiming the non-

human (the sites of abjection and social exclusion connoted with death or deadly impulses), 

rather than as party-politics or as class-struggle.  

 In this sense, the creature is a trope that subverts the exclusionary paradigm sketched by 

Lethen. It does not represent or merely replicate it. Throughout the journal Die Kreatur, the trope 

of the creature dictates an active production of the secular based on the elaboration of negative 

 
remarkable that all writers were based in Berlin, although Blei was an Austrian citizen. Also, they all 

emigrated in the 1930s (although Blei and Bruckner to the US and Wolf to Moscow). Wolf’s 

Bildungsroman and Blei’s novella fully reflect Helmuth Lethen’s characterization of die Kreatur as a 

trope on working-class literature (á la Brecht) made of experiments in écriture automatique like these 

Bronnen performed in OS (1929) studied by Lethen, but also in Die Septembernovelle (1923), or psycho-

social mechanisms typical of Kracauer’s reportage. Ferdinand Bruckner’s play Die Kreatur. Schauspiel in 

drei Akten (1930) most closely embodies Lethen’s emphasis on creaturely aesthetic as legalist and 

psycho-social research on automatic behaviors.  



 

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experiences, such as pain, fear, disorientation, violence, etc. achieved through a new discourse 

that begins with and unfolds another ethical conduct: terrestrial mysticism. This mysticism and 

attention to the non-human, non-life, inhuman and abject life represented a powerful alternative 

to narratives of the Earth framed as apocalyptical discourse, as fascism had it.7  

 

 

The Creature as Object of Biopolitics 

 

 If Lethen’s creatures are men in need of mercy, “objects in need of social solicitude” 

(Lethen 2002, 204), thus, more animal than others, Giorgio Agamben’s reading of creaturely life 

in L’Aperto (Agamben [2002]2003) challenges the assumption behind animality as such. To 

Agamben animality is the byproduct of biopolitical measures. It is produced vulnerability. It is 

produced through discourse, the discourse of science as much as literature, for discourse 

produces a specifically de-valorized side of the human subject, the animal, which remains on the 

edge of becoming captured through State necropolitics. In Eric Santner’s “psycho-theological” 

views expressed in On Creaturely Life (2006), however, the animal vulnerability of the creature 

does not regard specific social groups (or human/subhuman divisions, as Agamben claims). 

Creatureliness rather marks off the human (ontological and universal) incapacity to inhabit the 

 
7 As Jürgen Brokoff stated in his study of the apocalyptical Redeform (trope and discourse) of Weimar-era 

texts, political apocalypses like Hitler’s, Jünger’s, Benjamin’s and Schmitt’s, mainly, did not operate 

according to the framework of secularization (the transposition of John’s gospel into political discourse). 

To Brokoff, in Weimer’s apocalyptic political theology God’s transcendence is replaced (“ersetzt”) with 

“another transcendence” and not achieved through an elevated form of the immanent world that is the 

gospel’s theoretical movement, see, Brokoff, Jürgen, Die Apokalypse in der Weimarer Republik. Fink, 

2001, pp. 10-11.  



 

 30 

world in the same spontaneous and uninterrupted plenty ascribed to animals and plants, whereby 

Santner extends the onto-political relevance of creaturely life from Agamben’s emphasis on de-

humanizing partitions that involve excluded species, groups and populations, to humanity as 

such. 

 To contrast these two positions more extensively, Agamben criticized the traditional 

clear-cut between humanity and animality. What was separated as animal maybe belonged to us, 

while the properties ascribed to the Anthropos may be zoomorphic. The tradition of these 

difference-making acts is at the center of Agamben’s The Open, according to which Western 

culture (alias, the Judeo-Christian tradition in tension with Greek philosophy, the history of 

metaphysics, and the work of Walter Benjamin) is based on a decisive political conflict: the one 

between animality and humanity in the man. “Hence, Western culture is, co-originally, 

biopolitical” (Agamben 2003, 82). At the center of the so-called subject, there is a potent 

“anthropological machine”8 intrinsically biopolitical that continuously alienates the animal from 

the human, and that constituted ontological difference in the logic of inside/outside, both inside 

and outside the subject. If that was the ultimate conclusion of the brief and dense study on the 

open/l’aperto, the thesis becomes explicit only after Agamben’s narrative of a first encounter 

with a thirteenth-century Hebrew Bible illuminated with animalistic miniatures of Ezekiel’s 

eschatology, and a detour with Kojeve’s and Bataille’s animalism after “the end of history.” 

 
8 Macchina antropologica is the powerful mark of Furio Jesi’s ethnographic theory. Derived from Levi-

Strauss’s analysis of festive temporality, the anthropological machine identifies a ritualized collective 

process in which synchronous images of “I” and “Other” are produced, shared, and remembered (Jesi, 

2018). The use of this notion by Agamben has methodological effects on philosophy: philosophy 

becomes one of the several ritualized uses of language, as much as life science, illustrations of phila, and 

theological miniatures. These are cultural practices that fashion and refashion language through certain 

liturgies specific of their ‘field.’  



 

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Following an excursus in theological figures from the Late Roman Empire (“5. Physiology of the 

Blessed”) and the Middle Ages (“6. Cognitio Experimentalis”) —which is not only typical of 

Agamben’s method of untimeliness and Warburghian humanism, but also relevant archeology of 

the deification of animals in minor traditions, such as Gnosticism— the argument unfolding post-

history resumes with the partitions of life forms in works by Linnaeus, Ernst Haeckel, and Jakob 

von Uexküll. The latter prepares the amplest part of Agamben’s work devoted to Heidegger’s 

readings of von Uexküll’s Umwelt-theory and his understanding of Rilke’s poetics of the 

creature. Rilke and Heidegger, according to Agamben, remain in the paradigm of conjunction. 

But they push it so far, showing that animality is inaccessible, that we now receive the mystery 

of separation through the framework of post-metaphysics. On the one side, the side of human 

exceptionality, Heidegger finds the sense of human differentiation from the sphere of mere 

quotidian handling and hustling in the Stimmung of profound boredom. This state of mind, which 

both precipitates and elevates existence into the nothingness and the affirmative appearance of 

Being in an equivocal process called Aletheia, manifests that the essentially senseless human 

time can turn into a new form, in the guise of the “project.” This act connects the innermost 

temporality of existence with the echo of ontological time (let’s say, non-human, de facto 

jeopardizing Heidegger’s own understanding of his philosophy as a quest against humanism). 

The affective tonality open to the non-human time is the closest point of proximity between the 

animal relation and its specific and enclosed environment, the Benommenheit, a state of daze, 

which only depends on chains of inhibitors and disinhibits. On the other side, the side of praising 

immediate animal omniscience, according to Agamben, Rilke precludes any moment of 

existential conjunction of human and animal tout court. The creature had been entirely human, 

for instance, in the eschatology of Paul introduced by Agamben to interpret the poet. If humanity 



 

 32 

had never departed from the possibility of grace, even during the wait for the salvation of the 

created, with Rilke’s verses, however, the creature now becomes entirely animal. With the 

creature divorcing from the created and divided from the human, human reason cannot access to 

the world of grace, and comprehend what for the animal is a sensuous fusion with “the open.” 

 Under the label of mysterium disiunctionis, Agamben examines the genealogy of “a 

practical and political mystery of separation,” (16) concealed throughout Western traditions of 

animation. Starting with Aristotle’s De Anima, life science has articulated “life” in the form of a 

re-conjunction, always repeating the same move: the (non)-definitions of life exemplarily 

portrayed in The Open by histologist Xavier Bichat (1771-1802). It has only isolated functions to 

be reunified later, from Aristotle’s definition of the nutritive soul to the studies of Bichat about 

the internal and external animals in men. The conjunction “human animal” necessarily reunifies 

functions that had been isolated in the first place. Thus, we should be suspending this 

conjunction, and thinking through the mystery of separation, its incongruity. For, once life has 

been isolated in determined functions, State politics appropriate precisely the nutritive (or bare) 

part excluded beforehand, on the scale of a national population and with exterminating effects.  

To Agamben humanity is what results from the incongruity of these two elements: 

passions and logos, as they confuse and/or separate depending on discourse. Therefore, 

philosophy must not investigate the metaphysical mystery of human/animal conjunction, but 

rather the practical and political mystery of separation. As Agamben’s methodological point 

imposes to ask: 

 

What is man, if he is always the place—and, at the same time, the result—of ceaseless 

divisions and caesurae? It is more urgent to work on these divisions, to ask in what 



 

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way—within man—has man been separated from non-man, and the animal from the 

human, than it is to take positions on the great issues, on so-called human rights and 

values. And perhaps even the most luminous sphere of our relations with the divine 

depends, in some way, on that darker one which separates us from the animal. (16) 

 

 If Agamben introduced the Swiss ecologist von Uexküll in the creaturely tradition as one 

of Martin Heidegger’s sources for a theory of the extra-human temporality of being, Beatrice 

Hansen’s Walter Benjamin’s Other History: Of Stones, Animals, Human Beings, and Angels 

(2000) began a conversation on alterity, moving the meaning of creaturely alterity from the 

realm of ethics (the alterity of the other human) to the realm of cosmology (e.g., geological 

partitions of time, scales of temporalities in the universe, the alterity of other species’ time, the 

physical composition of the philosophical “world”), while Sigrid Weigel’s Walter Benjamin: Die 

Kreatur, das Heilige, die Bilder ([2008]2013) convincingly criticizes appropriations of 

philosophical texts, of Walter Benjamin in particular —where Agamben is the critical target— 

that do not underline how in the context of Weimar-era messianism alterity finds an ultimate 

theological resolution that nothing has to do with the secularization of Holy history into natural 

history.  

Jason Groves has in fact avoided the ideological simplifications against which Weigel 

warns, by collecting narratives of the Earth’s instability (from erratic rocks to porous/shaking 

grounds) to cut off the illusion of natural history as a merely taxonomic —or even worse, 

salvific— perspective in German literature. In The Geological Unconscious (2020) Groves does 

not engage with creaturely vulnerability or exposure to violence directly, but his frame shows 



 

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that there is space (and there are instruments) to deepen our understanding of the human/non-

human divide in terms of geological figures, which I see aggregated by the trope of the creature.  

 To recall the ontological side of “creaturely life” I must stress how this means a tendency 

to a fundamental point in time, in which —to borrow Santner’s words— “the peculiar proximity 

of the human to the animal at the very point of their radical difference” 9 would emerge. To 

Santner, the Archimedean point, at which difference is the closest to identity, is a limited form of 

Heidegger’s existential analytics of time. And it is also a critical moment in cultural history: a 

peculiar point of (near) contact between a dimension of Heidegger’s thought and that of a series 

of German-Jewish writers. The point of junction, and disjunction, between German-Jewish 

writers and Heidegger’s ontology, according to Santner, represents the “exposure to a traumatic 

dimension of political power and social bonds” which informs biopolitics. If “Franz Kafka, 

Franz Rosenzweig, Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin and Paul Celan, and, though he belongs 

to a somewhat different lineage, Sigmund Freud” draw a “complex topology that position the 

sovereign within a zone of extralegal authority within the law” (Santner 2006, 13), this literary 

topology delineates the trauma of politics as such. Sudden subjection to extralegal authority is 

what Santner defines as “essential disruption.” It is not clear, however, how the sudden 

appearance of State violence should draw a point of commonality, specifically, the closest 

 
9 “I am thinking, above all, of Franz Kafka, Franz Rosenzweig, Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin and 

Paul Celan, and, though he belongs to a somewhat different lineage, Sigmund Freud. For these writers, 

however, creaturely life —the peculiar proximity of the human to the animal at the very point of their 

radical difference— is a product not simply of man’s thrownness into the (enigmatic) “openness of 

Being” but of his exposure to a traumatic dimension of political power and social bonds whose structures 

have undergone radical transformation in modernity. The “essential disruption” that renders man 

“creaturely” for these writers has, that is, a distinctly political— or better, biopolitical— aspect; it names 

the threshold where life becomes a matter of politics and politics comes to inform the very matter and 

materiality of life.” Santner, Eric. On Creaturely Life, p. 12.  



 

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commonality of Jewish philosophy and phenomenology. While I disagree with Santner’s 

neutralization of how exposure to State violence works onto social groups selectively (and not 

universally as he claims), I consider his account of a “creaturely” (natural) exposure to violence 

to be particularly precious when it comes to the task of theorizing extra-human temporality, 

especially deep time. Together with Agamben’s theorization of the trope of the creature as 

human/animal dividing apparatus, Santner’s work remains a valuable framework to redefine the 

creature in terms of the human/non-human divide, while refocusing our question on what the 

trope performs in the vicinity, rather than in the separation, between the living and the dead, i.e., 

the kingdom of rocks, stones, minerals, strata and fossils.  

 Santner’s psychoanalytical and theological-political intervention also deserves credit for 

having signaled the importance of the journal Die Kreatur (1926-1930) to discuss a theory of 

creaturely life. In his terms, German-Jewish philosophy gives a specific curve to the problem of 

“the labor of the negative.”10 This is a “demand for assimilation,” especially mediated in the 

journal as “a life lived along the spectrum of pleasure and pain” (39). The form of this 

communion recalls the exposure to Jewish law, which is exposure to a “valid” yet empty 

revelation, “a validity without significance” (40). 

 If “creaturely life” first emerged as a negative capacity —the structural negativity of 

human existence as it emerges in particular in Rilke’s Duino Elegies (Santner and Agamben 

 
10 “Man is forever caught in the labor of the negative— the (essentially defensive) mapping and 

codification of objective domains that allow for certain sorts of desire and possession but never what 

Rilke posits as the unimaginable enjoyment of self-being in otherness manifest by the creature. […] Man, 

instead, is always condemned to the ceaseless production of mediating representations. […] Only those 

creatures that never experience a radical break between the sphere of gestation and the sphere of motility, 

creatures never distracted by memories of the more tender and intimate communion of the womb, as 

Rilke puts it, are fully at home in the Open.” Ivi, pp. 2-4. 



 

 36 

agree on this point)— the tradition of creaturely life has also witnessed contributions by Dominic 

Pettman in Creaturely Love (2017), which builds on the nexus of joy and mortality, as well as 

Bartosh’ and Ohrem’s collection of ecocritical essays: Beyond the Human-Animal Divide: 

Creaturely Lives in Literature and Culture (2017) that reviews the presence of animal figures in 

modern literature. In continuity with Agamben’s take on the human/animal divide as structurally 

biopolitical (functional to exclusionary politics), these recent works try to blur the human/animal 

divide in a post-humanist sense. Like David Will’s Inanimation, they function as a response to 

Jacques Derrida’s call to rethink “the limits between the human and the animal, the human and 

the natural, the human and the technical beyond animism and mechanism” (Will 2016, xi).  

 

  

The Creature as (Nonhumanist) Philosophical Project 

 

 More than thinking about what separates “us” from “nature” —whether an unconscious 

geologic agency revealed by global warming (Chakrabarty 2009), or the humanist ontological 

difference from the kingdoms of animals, plants and rocks— contemporary philosophy has 

recently offered models of human/non-human indistinction that connotes post-continental 

naturalism. What is naturalism? According to Ian James, Catherine Malabou’s naturalism 

represents a post-Continental project of continuity between science and philosophy: 

 

Post-Continental naturalism allows for the phenomenal and qualitative dimensions of 

thought and conscious experience (known to phenomenology), and the physicalistic or 

quantitative dimensions of material existence (known to science) to be brought and 



 

 37 

thought together without the one seeking to eliminate or otherwise downgrade the other. 

(James 2019, 14) 

 

 This form of naturalism responds to the prominence of time critically, for time as a 

philosophical category reduces its unit of analysis to extensions of consciousness. As 20th-

century phenomenology individuated the correlation of “consciousness” and “world” as its main 

object of analysis, this correlation proceeded as an exclusion, which was also an interrogation, of 

what is not human. The non-human only appeared as not-yet-human or no-more-human, namely, 

not given in the temporal experience of the subject. Today, this peculiar tradition of producing 

ontological differences via “reflection” may be understood as one among the many cultural 

practices of “anthropogenesis.” Practices of anthropogenesis, such as meditation on time, 

produce differences between humans and non-humans. They do so by establishing what is 

eminently human, its hierarchy and primacy. As Agamben theorized, thanks to the reflective, 

rational abilities assigned to humanity, philosophy grasped the concept of life by subtracting 

from the species underneath, imagined to be less and less complex mechanisms, descending bit-

by-bit, down to the liminal form of “bare” life. Bare life does not coincide with the findings of 

biology, as it would be, for instance, problematizing “clinical death” (Agamben, 2002, 16), or 

abortion. Once life has been isolated in determined functions, State politics appropriate precisely 

the nutritive, or vegetative life, a part excluded beforehand on the scale of a national population, 

and with exterminating effects.  

 Beyond the isolation of a specifically human feature —namely temporality, or what 

critical theory names “the negative” —there are philosophies that criticize the divide, for it only 

individuates disposable “resources” in the web of life. Examples include Kathryn Yosuff’s One 



 

 38 

Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (2018). In Yusoff’s critique of a supposedly human 

geological agency, the divide ultimately involves studying events and historiographies which 

would clarify how the properly Euro-human has been isolated and transformed into a citizen with 

human rights, within a spectrum of wondrous social and cultural diversity called the Anthropos. 

As the other pole of humanism, the Anthropos would be the man without property, and hence the 

provider of property (corporeal energy constituting free and forced labor).  

 In contemporary philosophy, cultural practices of translation between science and 

philosophy replaced the primacy of time as a difference-producing apparatus, and introduced 

modes of relation. The difference became an insurgency of related forms (forms of life, life-

forms and forms of surplus) in a political economy that flows circularly between formal and 

informal economics, in a loop, as exemplified in The Mushroom at the End of the World by Anna 

Tsing (2015). Human exceptionality was previously fashioned as an emergence from the 

kingdoms of rocks, plants and animals— or, if we listen to the critics of a more latent 

human/Anthropos divide, as a humanizing accumulation of capital from the organizations of the 

mine, the plantation, and the farm. This process had a high cost in terms of knowledge: it has 

rarely described the formation of life and its retroactively teleological temporality, a task 

embraced, instead, by Malabou in Before Tomorrow: Rationality and Epigenesis (2014). 

In the growing field of German “ecocriticism” (see the “transatlantic” collection edited 

by Dürbeck, Stobbe, Zapf, Zemanek, Ecological Thought in German Literature and Culture, 

2017; and, Helga Braunbeck’s literature review “Recent German Ecocriticism” in Monatshefte, 

Vol. 111/1, 2019), deep time is often the result of cultural practices that shape the imagination of 

“nature” —for instance, Naturlyrik, Ökolyrik, pastoral literature, travelogues, cultural studies on 

the symbolism of the mountain and the forest, or Naturphilosophie from Romanticism to today’s 



 

 39 

“Anthropozänliteratur” (Dürbeck-Nesselhauf, 2019). Although these debates have been relevant 

for the background research of my dissertation, I try to bring in conversation works in German 

studies that have engaged with geological, terrestrial, cosmic, or planetary forms of the 

human/non-human divide and offer a critical standpoint that interlocks literary criticism with 

epistemology..11 Therefore, I interrogated my corpus of source texts mostly through a body of 

literature often labelled as the “nonhuman turn,” which debates the nature of non-human time 

(es. Catherine Malabou, Barbara Stafford, Bruno Latour, Isabelle Stenger, Timothy Morton, just 

to name a few). Epistemologically informed studies of narratives of the non-human helped me 

interrogate historical documents from a set of contemporary questions that can be summarized as 

follows: 1. How did natural history contribute to secularizing the theological concept of the 

creature? 2. How do writers of literature, now and then, envision their position in relation to 

scientific movements? 3. How does the trope of the creature aggregate these “cosmopolitics”? 

 

 

Structure of the Dissertation 

 

 
11 Scholarly works turning the lens of the history of science to literary texts include Rochelle Tobias’ The 

Unnatural World: The Discourse of Nature in the Poetry of Paul Celan (2006); Axel Goodbody’s Nature, 

Technology and Cultural Change in Twentieth-Century German Literature (2007); Kate Rigby’s Dancing 

with Disaster. Environmental Histories, Narratives, and Ethics for Perilous Times (2015); as well as 

Vincent Blok’s Ernst Jünger’s Philosophy of Technology: Heidegger and the Poetics of the Anthropocene 

(2017) and Jason Groves’s The Geological Unconscious: German Literature and the Mineral Imaginary 

(2020). In the German language, Eva Geulen introduced the history of science vis-á-vis the deep temporal 

formation of life (epigenesis) to discuss German modernity in Aus dem Leben der Form: Goethes 

Morphologie und die Nager (2016). 



 

 40 

 As already mentioned, this dissertation consists of the present introduction and three 

chapters. In the first chapter, “Die Kreatur (1926-1930): A Project of Non-Theology” I illustrate 

interdisciplinary debates on evolutionary time documented in the interwar periodical based in 

Berlin, as probed through the writings of paleontologist Edgar Dacqué (1878-1945). In the 

second chapter titled “Walter Benjamin’s State(s) of Creation” I detail how Benjamin (1892-

1940) reconfigures the terrestrial semantics around the trope of the creature toward a theory of 

technological relationality with the Earth, or the cosmos, after criticizing the trope for its 

historical function of performing an escapist, holistic, or regressive fusion with the environment. 

In the third chapter “Paul Celan’s Textscape’” I interpret Celan’s (1920-1970) appropriations of 

natural and scientific lexica for his poetry, which allowed him to envision unique poetic figures 

of human/nonhuman continuity. 

 The inter-religious periodical Die Kreatur (1926-1930), which is at the center of my first 

chapter, has only recently received sustained scholarly attention. Daniel Weidner described the 

periodical as a site of epistemological experimentation, which, in the interwar case, also means 

equivocation (Naharaim 2016, 103–126; 2019). The periodical is in fact a pastiche that displays 

at once the idiosyncrasies and the visionary quality of the cultural journalism linked to 

Expressionism. Founded by Martin Buber, Viktor von Weizsäcker and Joseph Wittig, the journal 

was transdisciplinary avant la lettre, seeking to develop a conceptual framework for capturing 

and assessing liminal experiences at the periphery of the humanities. The editors insisted that the 

journal be “worldly:” “This journal will speak of the world —of all beings, of all things, of all 

events of our contemporary world— in a way that reveals its creaturely nature. It seeks not to 

practice theology, but more modestly: cosmology” (Buber, Weizsäcker, and Wittig, “Vorwort,” 



 

 41 

Die Kreatur, 2). Die Kreatur included biographical sketches in psychoanalysis, proposals for the 

reform of the  

educational system, articles on the philosophy of medicine, short stories, theories of natural 

history, essays on time and space, phantasmagorias of cities —all forms of a “naturalism” the 

editors defined as “non- theology” (Untheologie) (Ibid. 123).  

 I understand their “modest task… to practice cosmology” as a quest for a scientific 

approach to “creation” (e.g., spontaneity, generation, naturality) that was entirely worldly and 

human, rather than revealed by divinities. Ethics of finitude, therefore, had to replace dogmas of 

genesis. As I see it, Die Kreatur represented a rare hub of democratic imagination rooted in the 

post-anthropocentric perspective of psychoanalysis, medical anthropology, theoretical biology, 

and, surprisingly, natural history. The trend foreshadowed by Die Kreatur, which detected and 

emphasized the liberating potential of natural history against all odds —Dacqué became one of 

the most influential naturalists of the Nazi regime officials (Mosse 1964)— intensified after 

WWII. Many writers drew on “natural history” to de-mystify and de-normalize, in fact, de-

naturalize, violent social practices while retaining references to the biological constitution of 

human bodies. From this perspective, the subject of human evolutionary history is a social 

animal.  

This perspective is most famously reprised in the 1970s when one finds a proliferation of 

“natural histories” in the sense prefigured by Die Kreatur. From Katharina Rutschky’s Schwarze 

Pädagogik. Quellen zur Naturgeschichte der bürgerlichen Erziehung (1977), which reveals the 

making of the fascist subject through educational practices, to Theodor Adorno’s musings on 

natural history (in his early writings 1932; 1970), to Alexander Kluge’s never-accomplished 

project on “the natural destruction” of the German cities as an effect of the “natural” air warfare 



 

 42 

of the Allies, natural means social. Deliberate annihilation of urban spaces —and the fatalism 

through which it was rationalized by the German population— is also at the center of W.G. 

Sebald’s literary review in The Natural History of Destruction (1999). All stages of this critical 

tradition show that the reference to natural history represents a narrative strategy to address the 

dependence of the human on environmental circumstances that structure the social, which are 

made invisible by traditional, anthropocentric notions of time. 

 Such interpretations of social history in terms of an impersonal “natural history,” which 

would correct the human, all-too human tendencies to naturalize violence, represent only a 

marginal approach to natural history, which, as a scientific discipline, is mostly split between the 

historicist perspective of Naturgeschichte and the theoretical approach to ecology. In general, 

theoretical accounts of deep time such as those by Edgar Dacqué as they unfold in the journal 

Die Kreatur might sound extremely relevant to locate our existence in the Anthropocene, but 

such nonhuman experiences of deep time have long been considered to be the mark of the “secret 

science” of the Pan-German movement: the justification of State-driven biopolitical measures 

based on racial communitarianism (cf. Mosse 1964; Smith 1991). Racial communities were not 

only practiced in the form of rural utopias, but “ecosophic” circles were also founded in cities to 

promote a truly Germanic culture, for instance, the one led by Cosima Wagner at Bayreuth and 

Willibald Hentschel’s activism for the Artaman League, the völkish youth movement inspired by 

Aryan mythologies.  

 If the Third Reich promoted ecology as the triumph of the secret science, nature mystics 

and paleontologists like Edgar Dacqué were not only very much praised by Nazi, but also 

included in the editorial project of Die Kreatur. Dacqué, for instance, contributed to the 

periodical articulating liminal concepts of Urgestalt and Ursinn (cf. Die Kreatur, 344) mostly in 



 

 43 

association with a morphology of evolution. Morphology illustrated natural archetypes (or ur-

forms) understood as a teleological manifestation of deep time.  

 I interrogate the texts from Die Kreatur (1926-1930) that show a geological and 

historical-natural orientation alongside a body of literature often labelled as the “nonhuman 

turn,” which questions the philosophical nature of nonhuman time. Rather than focusing on 

nonhumanist reflections on technology, (from systems of knowledge to artificial intelligence 

(AI) and technological hybrids), I analyze speculations on cosmic, geological, and universal 

history. These constitute a very specific subset of the movement Richard Grusin surveyed in The 

Nonhuman Turn (2017). Theoreticians of nonhuman temporality in the sense of deep time 

exemplarily include Nigel Clark’s “Exorbitant Globality” (2005), whose work compares the 

climatic changes of planet Earth before human speciation. Similarly, Catherine Malabou 

interrogates the affinities between the temporal structures of earthquakes and the morphological 

development of embryos, from Kantian epigenesis to contemporary genetics (Malabou 2016). 

Within this complex spectrum of nonhumanist philosophies, only Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and 

Kathryn Yusoff dedicate full attention to “the power” of geological elements. In Stone: An 

Ecology of the Inhuman (2015), Cohen reveals the symbolic meaning of minerals and reconnects 

today’s use of powerful minerals like uranium, radium, and lithium to medieval treatises of 

inorganic chemistry. Kathryn Yusoff recalls Elizabeth Povinelli’s concept of “geopower” and 

Sylvia Wynter’s critique of Eurocentric abstractions about Man in order to recompose the 

“natural history” of slaves’ bodies who were functionalized (“fungible,” “interchangeable”) to 

modern mines, even when these materialities appear to be re-enacted in scientific, and thus 

apolitical, terms, as in today’s discourse of the Anthropocene (Yusoff 2018). Therefore, my 

dissertation introduces the nonhumanist paradigm into the historiography of the journal Die 



 

 44 

Kreatur, and creaturely life at large. Nonhumanist views are not limited to performing the 

linkage of theoretical ecology with the secret science of the Third Reich. They are well 

positioned to give an account of the deep temporal research that appears throughout Weimar-era 

heterogeneous messianism.  

 The second chapter, “Walter Benjamin’s State(s) of Creation” illustrates how Walter 

Benjamin’s Kreatur anticipated the natural-social histories of the seventies —Theodor Adorno, 

for instance, discussed Benjamin’s “state of creation” sketched in Ursprung des deutschen 

Trauerspiels (1928) in the text Die Idee der Naturgeschichte (1932) as well as in Ästhetische 

Theorie (1970), in which a discussion of Paul Celan’s “anorganisch” poetry can also be found. 

Benjamin contributed to the periodical Die Kreatur with his “Stadtbild” of Moscow redacted as 

he travelled with the communist performer Asjia Lacis. In parallel with Einbahnstraße (1928), 

Benjamin’s text constitutes an important bridge to define the creaturely trope in critical theory. 

Benjamin also wrote the lemma “Naturgeschichte” for the Soviet encyclopedia, and transcribed 

conversations later collected by Peter Suhrkamp and Adorno as the “urban portraits” of 

Städtebilder (1963) surveying the perception of public or open space with varying degrees of 

vibrancy. 

 These references show a dual understanding of Benjamin’s engagement with the 

“creaturely” trope. On the one hand, in Ursprung, one can see how Benjamin explores the trope 

as a figure that displays the world deprived of grace, the disenchantment of the world, the 

imaginary regression to pre-created nature, for the abstract, infinite, Copernican universe did not 

correspond to progress in humanist attempts to live with the forces of the cosmos (cf. 

Einbahnstraße). When not entirely escapist, or regressive, these attempts remain confined to 

institutional history, and Benjamin interprets modern cosmology as a form of naturalized 



 

 45 

political violence (Ibid.). On the other hand, Benjamin develops the trope of natural history 

without reference to early-modern scientific discoveries or early modern theater, but rather with 

literary images of urbanized environments that redirect his cosmological meditation toward the 

question of technology. 

 Building on the vast scholarship on the question of technology as it emerges in the cited 

sources, I will articulate the specific clash between science and humanist knowledge in terms of 

“state of creation.” This state identifies the epistemological condition of the early-modern man of 

letters: eyewitness to the scientific revolution amid the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648). During 

one of the most violent episodes of European history, in a time of plague, famine and witch 

hunts, the heuristic power moves from letters to numbers; for this reason, the animated world 

becomes a mechanism, while history decays to the portrait of a landscape in ruins (Benjamin 

1928). As Eli Friedlander argues, in Benjamin’s critical reconstruction of the Baroque mourning 

drama, “history is considered as leading back, through the disintegration of human edifices, to 

nature. It is in this return to the setting that one gleans a higher meaning of nature itself, of the 

creaturely state” (2012, 130). This “defiguration” of human history back to the creaturely state 

occurs at critical points in history, which I defined as “states of creation,” and it forces us to 

interrogate which epistemological condition scientific revolutions, and their correlated 

environmental changes, foster. The question of which temporality is expressed by this correlation 

as it emerges in Modernist critical theory is hence crucial to my second chapter.  

 The third and last chapter of this dissertation is devoted to “Paul Celan’s Textscape” and 

defines Celan’s nonhumanist poetics of kreatürliche Wege (as I propose, “animal tracks” cf. 

infra). Examining the trope of “the creature” in the post-war context through the works of Paul 

Celan clarifies how references to the creaturely trope can fashion an alternative tradition that 



 

 46 

spans from Büchner’s Danton’s Tod (“Büchner is the poet of the creature” cf. Der Meridian 

1960) to Kafka’s “Kreatürlichkeit” (Ibid.) in which Celan clearly rearticulates Benjamin’s theory 

of creatureliness as exposure to the cosmological temporality that emerged with the Scientific 

Revolution (see “Zum Planetarium” In Benjamin 1928). Celan’s re-articulation tends toward a 

geological —as said before, geodetical— framing of the poetic imagery. As Rochelle Tobias 

showed in her research on Celan’s “unnatural” discourse of nature (Tobias 2006), Celan 

appropriated works in geology, such as Roland Brinkmann’s Abriß der Geologie (1956) and 

Eberhard Brockhaus’s Die Entwicklungsgeschichte der Erde (1955) intensively. As I have 

argued elsewhere, these works challenged the politics of the ius sanguinis (Giannuzzi 2015) —

citizenship passed on by family history exclusively— in so far as they naturalized animal 

processes of migration, constituting a model to think about human movement accordingly. In 

Celan’s selection of natural histories and geological lexica, there is an eminent awareness of the 

political consequences of natural histories (in the plural).  Something that has yet to receive the 

attention it deserves is how nonhuman figurations of deep time in Celan’s poetry encode political 

experiences of mutualism, most of all within the frame of Piotr Kropotkin’s anarchist ecology 

(who is explicitly referenced in Celan’s Meridian speech). Therefore, the chapter re-examines 

the poetic works of Celan under the lens of critical ecology —in particular, Sprachgitter (1959), 

Die Niemandsrose (1963), and Lichtzwang (1970). In these collections, appropriations from the 

fields of the natural sciences do not occur by chance. If they challenge racist theories of 

continuity between blood and soil as foundational for citizenship, they also present an alternative 

that must be researched more accurately.  

  



 

 47 

CHAPTER I 

DIE KREATUR, A PROJECT OF NON-THEOLOGY12 

 

In this chapter, I examine how “the creature” emerges in Die Kreatur (1926-1930)13 as a 

figure that inscribes the human species —the living human species— into a non-living 

substratum, namely, the fossil records of evolutionary history. Determinations of the creature (or 

creatureliness) as a figure of animate/inanimate continuity mainly emerge from two overlooked 

contributions to DK written by geologist and paleontologist Edgar Dacqué. It is through 

Dacqué’s studies on the Urform, original/primitive form (DK II, 344–355; DK III, 223–235) —

and, secondarily, through Hugo Bergmann’s introduction to the “process-philosophy” of the 

mathematician Alfred North Whitehead (DK II, 356–363) as well as though Rudolf Ehrenberg’s 

interpretation of Bildung (formation) according to “theoretical biology”14 meaning here the 

reduction of Bildung as an individual force to Freudian drives and of biology to mathematized, 

irreversible, processes of energy consumption (DK I, 3–16) —that the natural sciences tried to 

respond to the question “What is a creature?”  

  

 
12 To define “non-theology” see infra, Introduction. Structure of the Dissertation. 
13 [= DK] 
14 Rudolf Ehrenberg published one of the first handbooks of materialist biology, proposing to reduce the 

study of life to chemical and physical forces organized through dissipative processes, processes that 

liberate energy without circularity, cf. Ehrenberg, Rudolf. Theoretische Biologie: Vom Standpunkt Der 

Irreversibilität Des Elementaren Lebensvorganges. Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 1923. 



 

 48 

CHAPTER I 

DIE KREATUR, A PROJECT OF NON-THEOLOGY 

 

SECTION 1 

Lapidarium. On Natural History as Morphology 

 

 This section examines Die Kreatur (1926-1930):15 the Weimar-era interreligious 

periodical that sought to philosophically identify a new collective mode of subjectivity, the 

creature. DK was once a quarterly edited by Martin Buber, Joseph Wittig, and Viktor von 

Weizsäcker. It was published by Lambert Schneider in Berlin16 and targeted the literati with 

long-reads as first proposed by the Deutsche Rundschau (Frank 2019, 32). The journal offered a 

“heretical”17 philosophy of Kreatürlichkeit (creatureliness): “the pathic/passive conception of the 

body (Leib) understood as a visible expression of the soul” (Braungart 1995, cit. Frank, 31); or, 

as an expression of “life fluxes” (Béla Balázs 1924, Ibid.). Accordingly, the first characteristic of 

the creature is to conceptualize the body as the threshold between animate and inanimate, in 

which the body is a passive surface and the environment an animating force.  

 
15 [= DK] 
16 To frame DK as a site of convergence of different “discourses” see also 

https://www.zflprojekte.de/zeitschrift-die-kreatur/. 
17 For an account of Joseph Wittig’s excommunication from the Catholic church, and references to the 

acts of the trial, see Viktor von Weizsäcker’s memoir Begegnungen und Entscheidungen (GS, I, 215). It 

has also been said that DK’s politics of religion aimed at challenging the Christocentric theological (and 

historical) views of, for instance, “Adolf von Harnack (Das Wesen des Christentums, 1900) and Wilhelm 

Bousset (Die Religion des Judentums im neutestamentlichen Zeitalter, 1903) that constructed Judaism as 

soteriologische Sackgasse [soteriological dead-end]” (Rosso, 75). 



 

 49 

Concerning this characteristic of this creature, which is being an embodiment of a system 

of life, “life” as a signifier connected philosophy and the natural sciences to theorize the creature 

as an anthropological sounding board of Weimar-era life sciences.18 As Hugo Bergmann’s 

contribution to DK will show (see Section II of this chapter), these were times of intense 

contention around the philosophical consequences of relativity theory (see also Geymonat, 1996, 

vol. 6–9; Čapek, 1991). New disciplines like the social sciences began to specialize (Lepenies, 

1985). The technical transfer brought electricity into the lab and disqualified old-fashioned 

narratives such as genealogical natural history:  

 

These were, manifestly, extremely exciting times, with the new, fundamental discoveries 

(such as the existence of discrete genes organized linearly on chromosomes) coming 

along fast and furiously in the decade or so leading up to World War I. Naturally, such 

stunning events that open up entire new vistas of research instantly divert attention. 

Biology had already developed as a serious science, pursued and taught at universities the 

world over. The entrance of electricity into the lab at once made the pursuit of biology 

more legitimately “scientific” in the minds of many of its practitioners. It also freed the 

subject from the pejorative identification with prosaic, old-fashioned, and decidedly non-

 
18 For an interpretation of life sciences, i.e., biology, as foundational reference for the Modernist human 

body cf. Gelderloos, Carl. Biological Modernism: The New Human in Weimar Culture. Northwestern 

University Press, 2020. For further reference on 20th century life sciences see: Canguilhem, Georges. La 

Connaissance De La Vie.  Libr. Philosophique J. Vrin, 1965; Ibid. Ideology and Rationality in the History 

of the Life Sciences. MIT Press, 1988. See also, Nyhart, Lynn K. Biology Takes Form: Animal 

Morphology and the German Universities, 1800-1900. University of Chicago Press, 1995; Ash, Mitchell 

G. Gestalt Psychology in German Culture, 1890-1967: Holism and the Quest for Objectivity. Cambridge 

University Press, 1995 as well as Harrington, Anne. Reenchanted Science: Holism in German Culture 

from Wilhelm II to Hitler. Princeton University Press, 1996. 



 

 50 

high tech “natural history.” If there were quibbles about the veracity of Darwin’s natural 

selection (many of Darwin’s critics in the last decades of his life attacked natural 

selection, rather than the general proposition that life has evolved through natural causes), 

“Darwinism” was seen by many avantgarde biologists at the beginning of the twentieth 

century as basically synonymous with old-fashioned natural history. It could 

consequently be ignored, if not openly derided. Overnight, biology had instead become 

the age of an excitingly revived “functional,” as opposed to a “historical,” science. 

(Eldredge 2015, 203). 

 

Perhaps not surprisingly given the avant-garde aspirations of the journal, Darwinism did 

not fare well in DK. The journal instead suggested that life was both a teleological principle, and 

hence more concerned with the “form” and “function” of bodies rather than with their “historical 

development.” DK’s editorial project was to articulate how to live an epistemologically grounded 

life, before the Fiktion (the ‘as if’) of the scientific description of the world offered by Weimar-

era discoveries and their claim to a mathematized, abstract, vision of the world.  

The paradox was known to Weimar-era intellectuals as the “crisis of science” (Ash 

1995). The formulation meant that progress in science did not increase knowledge of the human 

form of life. The philosopher Edmund Husserl identified this crisis as an effect of the division 

between quantitative and qualitative elements in the continuum of experience, with the following 

exclusion of qualities from the realm of objective science generated within the cosmology of the 

Scientific Revolution (Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale 

Phänomenologie, 1936). The rhetoric of the crisis of science was the climate of the Weimar-era 

philosophy of science. Intellectuals who wanted to offer an alternate understanding of the human 



 

 51 

condition often revived “morphology” to avoid both functional biology and outmoded natural 

history. Morphology was a bioscience developed in the first half of the 19th century that aimed to 

seize living beings both empirically and theoretically. It aimed to understand the idea of life 

forms (Kuhn 1978). In the German-speaking world, morphology stemmed from Goethe’s 1790 

autobiographical notes Zur Morphologie, which have a long and complex influence on 20th 

century theories of structure (cf. Axer-Geulen-Heimes 2021). Goethe’s notes inspired works in 

botany that made vast use of his dynamic concept of metamorphosis as “dynamic order” 

(Geulen, ivi, 41), in which the ideal form is defined by the plastic relation between unique 

structures and their order in a composed, or artificially constructed, series.19 

 Edgar Dacqué has been defined as one of the most eminent representatives of German 

morphology in the 20th century (Levit-Meister 2006). In parallel with the botanist Wilhelm Troll 

(1897-1978), he contributed to the return of “idealist” or Romantic morphology in the Weimar 

Republic once the prominence of environmental causation upon inner disposition had been 

established in part by Heinrich Georg Bronn’s 1860 translation of Darwin’s Origin of the Species 

(1859) (Gliboff 2008), in part by Haeckel’s frequent tributes to the philosopher of Down House. 

His influential research program in the German biosciences (Meister 2005) has been read as an 

outmoded morphological system of life amid the empiricist disaggregation of the Kantian a 

priori subject conducted in the journal Kant-Studien.20  

 
19 The variety of morphological schools also include more static formal studies of organisms such as Ernst 

Haeckel’s —the most influential don of German zoology (cf. Meyer 2009) —and, not secondarily, the 

heterogeneous currents of vitalism: e.g., Georg Ernst Stahl, or Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, only to 

mention some of the most prolific 19th century examples of Naturphilosophie. 
20 This is where writings by the “biological avant-garde” —as Niles Eldredge called theoretical biology— 

were published: for instance, Ludwig von Bertalanffy’s discussion of Ehrenberg’s dissipative theory (cf. 

Bertalanffy, Ludwig von. “Zum Problem einer theoretischen Biologie” Kant-Studien, vol. 34, 1929, pp. 



 

 52 

It is true that to Dacqué organisms do not change to adapt to external circumstances. 

They rather change form by producing both positive and negative innovations to come closer to 

their “type.”21 The type was supposed to enhance the Darwinian theory of evolution by natural 

selection with a theory of intrinsic perfection.  

 Historians of science have often depicted the morphological orientations in a sort of 

Manichean division between good (Darwinian) and evil (morphological) science, concluding that 

 
374–389). See. also Drack, Manfred. “Ludwig von Bertalanffy’s Organismic View on the Theory of 

Evolution.” Journal of Experimental Zoology, 324B, pp. 77–90. This is also the place where leading 

theoreticians of Aryan palaeontology presented their texts on Kant, like Beurlen, who was the director of 

the Zoology Museum in Munich during the Third Reich (cf. Beurlen, Karl, “Der Zeitbegriff in der 

modernen Naturwissenschaft und das Kausalitätsprinzip.” Kant-Studien, vol. 41, 1936, 16–37). Before 

1930 Hugo Begmann and Martin Buber who contribute to DK published texts on the Kant-Studien too (cf. 

https://www.kant.uni-mainz.de/ks/KS_1896-1944.htm).  
21 For the type as a fundamental concept of biology, see the three-folded definition given by Georg 

Toepfer in BioConcepts. A Multilingual Database (accessed on Sept. 16th, 2022):  

1) The Gestalt or form of an organism that is characterized by a trait or a bundle of traits that is common 

to a group of organisms and welds them into a uniform group. Types can be identified on different 

taxonomical levels: from “phylum,” “class” and species to pheno- and genotypes within a species;  

2) A species or genus which most perfectly exhibits the essential characters of its family or group, and 

from which the family or group is (usually) named; an individual embodying all the distinctive 

characteristics of a species, etc., esp. the specimen on which the first published description of a species is 

based;  

3) The individual (dead) body, which is the name bearer of a species, i.e., the specimen which was used in 

the original scientific description of a biological species; according to the rules of nomenclature, this 

individual specimen forever remains the scientific representative of the species it was part of during its 

lifetime; it does not necessarily show the typical characteristics of the species. For a conceptual history of 

the “type” in the humanities and social sciences around and after 1900 reacting to the disaggregation of 

the Kantian a priori, see also Müller-Tamm, 2015; cf. also, Ordnung des Diversen. Typeneinteilungen um 

1900. ZfL Blog. Blog des Zentrums für Literatur- und Kulturforschung, published on 07.06.2018. 



 

 53 

in German science the use of evolutionary methods remained sporadic and aleatory.22 Georgy S. 

Levit and Kay Meister speak of atavism of German Romanticism (2006): a paradigm that 

privileged the Urbild (the ‘plan’ of an organism) with very tight margins for contingent 

variability and define the Weimer Republic as an epoch of “methodological ideologies” (211). 

Instead, reading Dacqué’s contributions to DK more closely shows that the radical 

anthropocentrism Dacqué embraces can have revealing consequences. First, Dacqué’s 

philosophical anthropology tries in fact to displace given hierarchies of the living, introducing a 

subversive and pluralistic image of the living world: the Bushes of Life in place of the Tree of 

Life. Second, Dacqué radicalizes the principle of subjective necessity to the point of subverting 

conventional chronology, i.e., now the human species needs-, tends to-, and is also cause of the 

ape. Third, confronting the mythological premises of science (myths, legends, and folklore) as 

well as its religious overtones, Dacqué theorizes the species as an affective body, and thus, as a 

new site of both political and esoteric identity. In other words, Dacqué truly theorizes the 

dependence of all nature on the human species (anthropocentrism). By doing so, and because the 

results he obtains are absurd, his texts offer the most convincing failure of the anthropocentric 

predicament in the Weimar-era.  

To explore the characteristics of a new collective subjectivity to reform (institutionally) 

and to re-form (anthropologically), Weizsäcker, the editor of DK who engaged with the natural 

sciences the most, developed a new branch of medical anthropology: “pathosophy” (a 

 
22 That German morphology has never been “evolutionary” is a claim substantiated with vast accounts 

from the work of several scientist: from the first generation of anatomists composed by Ernst Haeckel 

(1834-1919) and Karl Gegenbaur (1826-1903) to the second generation of morphologists including the 

racial theorist Viktor Franz (1883-1950); the relatively independent Hans Böker (1886-1939) and the 

Russian Alexej N. Sewertzoff (1866-1936). 



 

 54 

philosophy that articulates the in-between of passions and malady) over the years.23 This 

discipline blended studies on perception and anti-psychiatry while abandoning the mystical traits 

that were popular in DK. Likewise, continuity with the affective, historically given, environment 

is key to Dacqué’s natural history. The creaturely continuity of living and non-living, often 

signaled by parallel concepts of Geschöpf and Lebewesen, functions as a critique to theorizations 

of the human as one-sidedly active, productive, self-creative, self-poietic, in other words, as 

independent from binding relations (nature) or relationality itself. As I argue, the contributions 

by Weizsäcker, Dacqué, Bergmann, and Ehrenberg indicate relational responses to the crisis of 

science.24  

 To determine how the relationality of the animate/inanimate continuum typical of the 

trope of Kreatur emerged in parallel with geological narratives of deep time, we need to examine 

Edgar Dacqué’s contributions more closely (Section 2). As this chapter contends, formal 

determinations of living bodies (where forms are metamorphic, contingent, and not a priori 

determinations) circulated through Whitehead’s natural philosophy (Section 3) as much as 

through Walter Benjamin’s messianic critique (see next chapter) of Dacqué’s theory of 

evolution. Quite surprisingly, not too distant from Dacqué’s geological —for many, idealist or 

ideological— morphology. 

  

 
23 For an overview of von Weizsäcker’s research interests and life-trajectory from Gestalt-Theorie to 

medical anthropology cf. P. Hahn and W. Jacob (curators), Viktor von Weizsäcker zum 100. Geburstag 

(1987).  
24 Relationalism, also called ‘the Relational View’, is a theory of perceptual experience which sees at least 

a central core of such experience as consisting in a non-representational relation between subjects and 

features of their environment.  



 

 55 

CHAPTER I 

DIE KREATUR, A PROJECT OF NON-THEOLOGY 

 

SECTION 2 

Edgar Dacqué’s Morphology 
 

And what seduction is more violent than the one of changing 

species, to transfigure oneself into the animal, the vegetable, the 

mineral or even the inanimate? 

 

Jean Baudrillard, The Ecstasy of Communication (1988) 

 

 

This section discusses the trope of Kreatur as an emblem of tension between evolutionary 

history and epistemology. The trope closely intersects the discourse of Trieb/drives (instincts, 

animality/animalization, specialization of animals or phylogenesis, adaptation of the species),25 

disclosing the problem of how to name, configure, order, and theorize gaps in knowledge (i.e., 

fossil records) with the paleontologist Edgar Dacqué (1878-1945) who contributed to the journal 

DK with texts from the field of natural history. Dacqué defended the philosophical perspective of 

radical anthropomorphism —all nature depends on the human species, which is the main 

creation of the divine— with interesting results, at once absurd and subversive. 

 
25 That “drives” are theoretical placeholders for gaps in knowledge see, among others, Joseph Vogl in Jan 

Niklas Howe, Kai Wiegandt (editors), Trieb. Poetiken und Politiken einer modernen Letztbegründun