You can hear from the radio:
The moon is young and the night is hot. Shooting stars are falling./ And sweat is dripping from my forehead. It's dark and I can't see your face.
I mute Bajaga's voice from 1984 to watch a report on forest fires in Mediterranean areas in 2024 on television. And I feel sorry for the forest. In my inner world, under the flames of real fires, the memory of reading the adventure novel "The Forest is Burning" awakens. As a kid I swallowed it once, then again. That fictitious fire in the novel by James Oliver Curwood, the best-selling American writer of his generation, prepared me in time for a world falling apart in the heat. Literature is sometimes clairvoyant in its playfulness. Although that is not her intention.
What else is a person to do when summer has just started, and there are already several weeks of heat behind him - the ones that don't let you think? The news of the day is hot, in competition with football, the wars in Ukraine and the Gaza Strip, and domestic political games without borders. The matter has long since become serious. Just for all of us to get serious.
Early dog days
The expression "dog days" for unbearable heat is known in the German language (Hundstage), but there is an interpretation that the basis of this expression is in Greek mythology. The ancient Greeks believed that "dog days" occur when the daylight of the god Helios merges with the fire of the brightest star in the Constellation of the Dog - Sirius. In fact, it is a very specific period of summer that starts on July 23 and lasts for a month. The arrival of "dog days" in May or June is one of the indicators that something is wrong.
My survival strategy is turning to what I only know how to do - thinking about artistic responses to the challenges we are exposed to. Those challenges certainly include the unbearable heat, which makes me sweat.
In the literary industry, the topic gained importance. University lectures on "climate fiction" are organized, workshops are paid for, in which oral histories about the experienced extreme heat are collected. Or about its reverse - devastating storms and catastrophic floods.
Even ten years ago, major publishers refused to publish books that in one way or another approached climate change artistically. "Climate fiction" was treated as a subgenre of science fiction. But things have changed. The texts of the authors who dealt with the causes of our groaning under the heavy bell of heat in the cities, as if under the cover of a honeycomb, absorbed utopian and dystopian elements, the aesthetics of cyberpunk, futurism, thrillers and science fiction. An example of such books is "The Great Derangement" (2016) written by Amitav Gosh. His parents had to leave Bangladesh because of the floods.
Climate quartet
One of the most important Taiwanese writers, Wu Ming-Ji, also felt the increase in the market value of climate catastrophe as a literary commodity. Although he has been dealing with this topic for a long time, his books have only recently started to be translated into major European languages such as German.
Of course, neither they nor other writers who deal with what most of us try to ignore did not come out of nowhere. In 1993, the most famous African-American science fiction author, Octavia Butler, staged a fatal drought in California in her Parable of the Sower.
Seven years later, in the novel "Friend of the Earth", Tee Si Boyle described an activist fighting against climate change in the year 2025. That is, in the year ahead. It is worrying that our reality has come dangerously close to fiction in these books.
I remember meeting Ilija Trojanov, one of the most important writers of the German language, of Bulgarian origin, at the Bookstan literary festival in Sarajevo a few years ago. In 2011, he published the novel "EisTau" - loosely translated as "LedRosa". Its main character is a glaciologist whose object of love and research - ice - disappears before his eyes. The melting of alpine and polar ice becomes palpably painful when Troyan's literary skill makes us look at it through the eyes of a literary hero.
These are individual books. However, there are already international literary stars whose works exclusively deal with climate change. The brightest of them is the Norwegian Maja Lunde. In 2015, the writer from Oslo published the novel "The History of Bees" in which she intertwined the dying of bees with human destinies. The novel became a hit and was translated into 30 languages. Three more novels of the "Climate Quartet" followed.
Romantic summer on the shelves
The history of literature says that until recently, heat waves and overheating of cities were not a literary topic at all. Summer in art was often a symbol of the joy of life, the fullness of existence. "High noon" comes to mind - Nietzsche's thought. By the way, the greatest heat does not come at noon, but when the concrete is soaked in the sun, in the late afternoon.
Tedor Fontane, a German writer from the 19th century, in his poem "Good advice" recommended the reader to take a walking stick one summer morning and that it would "remove worries like fog". Fontane attributed a healing effect to a walk on a summer morning: "The clear blue of the sky, a smile makes its way to the heart." This idealized image of summer is not uncommon in the literature of previous centuries. Heinrich Heine, a poet and satirist, an older contemporary of Fontane, left us the song "Blistavou letnje jutra", for which music was later written by Robert Schumann. Heine's poetic subject walks silently through the garden, while the flowers speak and whisper. He is mute because of unrequited love, and the flowers persuade him not to be angry with their "sister", his unsuspecting love. Thus, the romantic representation of a summer morning - light, freshness, nature in bloom - serves as a color background for amorous melancholy.
Slightly older than both of them, Friedrich Helderlin, the "absolute poet", also made a point in his poem "Summer" by saying that the summer day "frames the year with majesty".
Rainer Marija Rilke dedicated a poem to "The Sundial". "A pillar standing in the midst of marjoram and coriander and showing the summer hours". Georg Trakl wrote my favorite poem about summer - actually about the eve before a summer storm.
Kurt Tuholski already had a contemporary understanding of heat - the poem "Thirty degrees" was written in 1918. "It's a time of thick summer heat/ the thermometer is boiling/ the sun is burning". The poet on the beach watches a corpulent lady entering the water, raising the water level, and wonders if her name is Germania. In world poetry, Eliot's "The Waste Land" comes to mind, through which the heat blows. In Camus' The Stranger, Meursault kills an Arab blinded by the sun and crushed by the heat. In 1948, the Irish writer Elizabeth Boen published the important novel "The Heat".
It could go on and on. But in the poetry and prose of previous centuries there was still no word about what is happening to us who live in the third decade of the second millennium.
Movies and music are hot
Young authors of the German language are also reaching for hot literary material. Franciska Gensler in "Eternal Summer" describes a hotel without guests around which the woods are burning. Her characters talk at plus forty. I am writing this at the same temperature.
If it's too hot to read, we're left with movies and music.
Terrence Malick's film Days of God, starring Richard Gere as Billy and Brooke Adams as Abby, suggests the merciless Texas sun. In Germany, the film came to cinemas under the title "Mid of the heat of the south". The film features burning cornfields, locust infestations, and other apocalyptic hints.
For my generation, Coppola's "Apocalypse Today" already hinted at the coming epoch with its first scenes. Willard wakes up hungover in a cheap Saigon hotel, covered in heat and haunted by bad memories. Coppola made one of the best films of all time in 1979. Unbearable heat on the verge of madness is the normal temperature of war. It's just that the war, which Coppola narrated in an unheard-of cinematic language, was already over by then. And the war whose operating temperature is plus forty in the shade is still in full swing. The war of man against nature, and consequently - nature against man.
In 2001, Austrian radical film director Urlich Seidl made the film "Dog Days" about the heat in a Viennese district. That heat helps as a catalyst to lay bare the man's monstrous core.
All this can cover the sound of George Gershwin - Summertime from the opera "Porgy and Bess" - a thing immortalized in a series of jazz and blues versions by the voices of artists such as Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald and Janis Joplin, as well as the trumpet and voice of Louis Armstrong: "In the summer time you can live well, the fish jump, the cotton swaddled, your dad is rich, your mom is beautiful, hey, baby, don't cry anymore".
But the heavy longing of a hot summer night is, for me, most vividly expressed through the sound of the great Sidney Beshe's clarinet. His instrumental version of Gershwin's aria, recorded in 1939, always draws me into the metaphysics of summer heat, into the eternal touch of heat and sadness.
I don't want to give in to this sticky, thick song until the end. That's why I'm writing this down. Somewhere humanity has gone astray. Is there a cure?
It's not a shame?
Kim Stanley Robinson, author The Martian Trilogy, became one of the leading names in climate fiction after publishing the book "The Ministry of the Future" four years ago. The drought in India claimed tens of thousands of lives in that novel. They began to invite Robinson to world conferences, the former US president recommended his books. Robinson accepted the role of the prophet in an ironic way: "It should not be the lonely fantasy of some writer who sits in his garden and imagines that there could be a better world."
So it is not up to him to warn us. It's up to all of us who don't hear it. Back in 1973, the Swiss author Franz Holler stated in one of his songs: "I am sure, ladies and gentlemen, that the downfall of the world has already begun."
Exactly 50 years later, the young Austrian writer Laura Freudenthaler has no doubt that Holler is right. She published the novel "Arson" in 2023. The name itself is actually the key to experiencing today's world, because it means - arson. The world is our house, and we are arsonists.
Our film great Aleksandar Petrović knew this back in 1968. His film from that year begins with music. A musician with a golden tooth sings: "It will almost be the end of the world!" His colleague, the double-bassist, also replies with a smile: "Let it fail, it's not a pity". The film ends with the same song.
Crisis mode is the most normal form of existence here, in the south of the continent. It is always accompanied by laughter, which we wear as a mask in front of our sadness and restlessness throughout life. Even when the heat is oppressive and the sky is black. And when, as at this moment, a large drop of rain flattens on the hot concrete in front of the building, leaving an illegible message. And one more. And one more.
Bonus video:
