The River as a Human Lifeline: The Case of Werner Bergengruen’s “Der Strom.” Medieval Literary Reflections and Modern Responses

By means of ecocritical perspectives, we can build meaningful and relevant connections between the STEM fields and the Humanities. Literary works, above all, whether from the Middle Ages or the modern world, read through that lens, can yield important new perspectives about the relationship between humans and nature. In this study, the focus rests on rivers as reflected in fictional works. After highlighting the symbolic significance of rivers in some of the major medieval German, Italian, and English poems, the article, leaping to the twentieth century, investigates the role of the river in two novellas by the Baltic-German author Werner Bergengruen (d. 1964) and identifies them as indirect but powerful contributions to the new movement of ‘magic realism’ that had not yet reached the German audiences at that time. While Bergengruen is mostly disregarded today for political and ideological reasons, the ecocritical message contained in his texts promises to uncover the true literary quality of his narratives and their relevance for ecocritical awareness regarding rivers as a protagonist’s lifeline. In many ways, we can recognize in his work a direct reflection of medieval thought, yet he transcended those and cast them in his own concept and value system.