FLIGHT PATHS: Of Avian Lives and Human Survival

Presenting Bernhard Malkmus’s new book Flight Paths / Himmelsstriche (2025) 

Author Bernhard Malkmus and translator Marielle Sutherland present readings in English and German from Bernhard’s new book FLIGHT PATHS / Himmelsstriche (2025), a memoir and ecological reflection on life on the Northumbrian coast and in the Scottish mountains.

About the Speakers

Bernhard Malkmus is an author and tutorial fellow of German at New College, Oxford. His creative work focuses on poetry and nature writing; his academic work on Romanticism, modernism, nature aesthetics, and environmental ethics. He is currently writing a literary history of the Great Acceleration and a political theory of nature conservation. See: https://www.matthes-seitz-berlin.de/autor/bernhard-malkmus.html

Marielle Sutherland is a translator at the German Historical Institute London. She has published fiction and non-fiction books and several volumes of poetry in translation, as well as literary extracts in journals.

About the book

The English Northeast is a hotspot of the Anthropocene, a landscape, a seascape, and a skyscape whose intertwined natural and cultural histories are like an open book for us to read. Here, the richest coal deposits of Great Britain were exploited until recently, the largest shipyards of the world operated around 1900, and huge chemical plants continue to transform the metabolism of the Earth to this very day: This English-Scottish borderland tells the stories of mining and industrialisation as origin stories of the biosphere’s cataclysmic transformation throughout modernity.

Fringed by the rough coastline of the North Sea in the East and the bleak Pennines and Cheviots in the West, this region is also an important breeding ground for many bird species. Since spring 2022, seabird populations under these skies – and across the country – have been ravaged by avian flu. The virus was bred in the factories of industrial food production, has spread throughout the entire world by migratory birds, and has now begun to affect mammals.

Flight Paths is a travelogue through these little-known territories whose history and future become emblematic of our planetary fate. The narrator’s excursions on foot unearth the deep strata of this particular cultural landscape, its human, animal and plant inhabitants – and their imbrication with histories of globalisation and planetary boundaries. A song to the sea and the seabirds. A reflection on our lives in a pandemic age. A search for the roots and the reasons behind our collective suppression of ecological realities. In the era of the Sixth Mass Extinction, the book seeks to develop a language for the beauty of the living world, for the work of mourning about its loss, and for an ethos of cohabitation with the natural world.

Both hymn and elegy, Flight Paths offers a new mode of nature writing: sensual and polemical, playful and political. It is written in a language that tears us out of our oblivion of nature, our comfort zones, our loneliness without the kinship of other creatures.

Himmelsstriche: Vom Leben der Vögel und Überleben der Menschen (Berlin: Matthes & Seitz, 2025), 248pp.

All Welcome. Followed by light refreshments.