| Summary: | The six stories in Ulrike Almut Sandig's Buch gegen das Verschwinden, each multi-layered in itself, are linked by leitmotifs so making a cycle that invites repeated reading, rather as a symphony invites repeated listening. The later stories, especially the last sci-fi adventure, cast retrospective light back over the collection, so highlighting ecological issues in stories which juxtapose threatened disappearances (of species, of wilderness) on a geological time scale, with disappearances (a lost child, declining bodily health, death of loved ones, memory loss) on the time scale of individual human life. Sandig's vividly atmospheric writing has affinities with poetic realism, notably Storm's ‘Der Schimmelreiter’, and stands more broadly in a long post-Enlightenment tradition of fascination with scientific enquiry, yet tension between instrumental reason that seeks mastery over nature and anguished feeling for the natural world under threat from human activity.
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