Contemporary novels about climate change  Between Reality, Dystopia and Fiction

Climate fiction, eco-thrillers, docufiction – the climate crisis is reflected in contemporary German novels and reveals what concerns and affects us as a society. An interview with the literary and cultural scholar Gabriele Dürbeck.

“Dark fir trees, Green meadows in the sunshine, Heidi, Heidi, You need them to be happy”. Many people in the German-speaking world will be familiar with this song and its chorus from the animated cartoon series Heidi, a story based on the books by Johanna Spyri. The idyllic world of the Swiss Alps takes centre stage in this tale about Heidi, an orphan girl who is happiest when she is in the mountains. Spyri wrote her novel in 1880, nearly 130 years ago. Not only has society changed considerably in the meantime, the global climate is different too: according to the European Earth observation programme Copernicus, 2024 saw the Earth’s temperature exceed pre-industrial levels by 1.5 degrees Celsius for the first time. Caused by human activity, this rise in temperature is to blame for the global destruction of ecosystems and habitats. What was still the norm in Spyri’s day – an intact natural environment – is now threatened by the climate crisis.

It All Began with the “Swarm”

This has also had an impact on the novels we read. “In Germany, The Swarm, an eco-thriller by Frank Schätzing that was published in 2004, was one of the books that brought eco-fiction mass appeal. Starting around 2010, we saw a surge in novels with climate-related and environmental themes,” recalls Gabriele Dürbeck, a professor of literary and cultural studies at the University of Vechta. “Ever since, and boosted by the Paris climate summit in 2015, the climate crisis has received more public attention and the subject has become more widely accessible.” Schätzing’s novel is about the destruction of the environment by humans, bizarre natural phenomena and an unknown species that poses a threat to humankind. According to Dürbeck, an eco-thriller typically “uses elements of science fiction, thriller and docufiction to depict a climate or environmental disaster and popularizes environmental knowledge.” She explains that discussions about risk play a major role and that such novels contain a warning – even if they do often have a happy ending. The eco-thriller is a subgenre of the novel and evolved in tandem with the climate crisis. It falls within the category of climate fiction, or cli-fi for short. Dürbeck regards the eco-thriller as a genre of popular fiction, while cli-fi also encompasses literary fiction. “Many of the stories told in climate change literature have a melancholic undertone, such as Ilija Trojanow’s novel The Lamentations of Zeno,” says Dürbeck, adding that climate novels not only feature solastalgia – the grief felt at the loss and destruction of nature – but also offer the reader a chance to process this loss of nature. “Fiction can remind us of what has been lost and help us not to forget things we are unable to preserve.”

Fiction is More Radical Than Politics

Over the years, Dürbeck has seen German novels deal with all kinds of phenomena related to the climate crisis: “Thilo Winter writes about melting glaciers in Der Riss, while Roman Ehrlich addresses rising sea levels in Malé. Species extinction is also a popular theme, as in Jasmin Schreiber’s novel Endling.” Another important topic in eco-fiction is the relationship between humans and animals, she notes.

Dürbeck believes that eco-fiction stems from an awareness that we are “in the midst of the climate crisis”. “Climate change is a phenomenon that’s not easy to portray because it’s a slow-moving process involving many different factors. How is one supposed to depict tipping points or triggers? We can feel and experience weather, but not climate. A disaster such as that which befell the Ahr Valley, when huge amounts of water rapidly deluged a densely populated valley, shows us the consequences of climate change. Eco-fiction also tends to address the impacts of the climate crisis – such as extreme weather, melting glaciers or forest fires,” she says. To make abstract phenomena easier to grasp, many climate novels feature smaller-scale settings such as specific regions or family constellations. It’s not without good reason that many climate novels depict dystopian visions. “Literature has the chance to address conflicts and provoke discourse,” explains Dürbeck. “In politics, climate issues are increasingly downplayed, ambitious climate targets are diluted and the phase-out of fossil energies is postponed time and again. The topic is sliding out of focus. Literature takes a more radical approach.” At the same time, many novels highlight possible solutions and ideas for change.

Global Phenomenon

Eco-fiction worldwide was given a major boost in 2017 when Norwegian writer Maja Lunde published The History of Bees – paving the way for climate fiction. Authors from the Global South have been writing about the subject for decades, however. This reveals how different regions of the world are affected by climate and environmental damage in different ways. In the early 2000s, the Chilean author Isabel Allende published her young adult novel City of the Beasts, in which she addresses issues such as the destruction of the environment in Brazil. This novel is an early example of a fascinating blend of reality and fiction. Yet the environment is by no means an entirely new topic in German literature, either. “In the 1970s and 1980s, forest dieback and deforestation were already very much present in German environmental poetry,” recalls Dürbeck. No doubt the increasingly visible impacts of climate change will also lead to further cli-fi novels in the future.

November 2025