THE SWISS AUTHOR MAX FRISCH wrote in his novel Der Mensch erscheint im Holozän(Man Appears in the Holocene) that “Katastrophen kennt allein der Mensch, sofern er sie überlebt; die Natur kennt keine Katastrophen” (human beings alone experience catastrophes—provided they survive them; nature does not recognize catastrophes). The way we perceive the onslaught of natural disasters is deeply grounded in sociocultural conventions. With the rise of the sciences in the early modern era, our understanding of nature has undergone a dramatic paradigm shift. Through the scientific lens, the natural world has seemingly been reduced to a demystified other. Conversely, narrative and rhetorical conventions utilized in the depiction of catastrophic events during the European Enlightenment reveal a surprising resistance to reflecting the changes in human understanding of nature's inner processes. Rosmarie Zeller's analysis of early modern popular print media concludes that until the first half of the eighteenth century, the scientific discourse had only a limited influence over entrenched religious-animistic interpretations of natural hazards. Such interpretative patterns apparently belong to the phenomena of the longue durée. In a similar fashion, François Walter notes how literature has continuously reified certain stereotypes of tragic and dramatic scenes. Walter's comprehensive cultural history of catastrophes cites examples of iconographic clichés in literary treatments of the Great Flood by eighteenth-century German-speaking authors. However, the depictions of heart-wrenching scenes in which the lives of the panicked multitudes are cut short possess an extensive backstory. These so-called tableaux of terror have been a mainstay of disaster narratives since antiquity. As I will show, they did not solely belong to the realm of fiction but played a prominent role in “authentic” earthquake accounts published in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The term catastrophe, which has its roots in ancient Greek dramaturgy, denotes a “downward turn” of events and is linked to Aristotle's definition of peripeteia, a sudden reversal of fortune or change in circumstances. In disaster narratives, the unexpected break in the quotidian is commonly juxtaposed against the portrayal of the idyllic hours or days prior to the onset of the calamities. Keen observers may report the sight of ominous portents, invoking the archaic belief that the disaster, as the etymology of the word reveals, occurs under an “evil star” or an adverse astrological constellation.