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Book Review
| Strasse, Bahn, Panorama: Verkehrswege und Landschaft-sveränderung in Deutschland von 1930 bis 1990. [Road, Course, Panorama: Traffic Routes and Landscape Changes in Germany from 1930 to 1990.] By Thomas Zeller. Frankfurt/New York: Campus Verlag, 2002. 451 pp. Bibliography. Cloth 45.00 (Euro).
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| This innovative dissertation examines the changing social construction, cultural representation, and environmental significance of transportation landscapes in twentieth-century Germany. The book's main focus is highway planning and landscape design along the German Autobahn system between 1930 and 1970, although it also includes a chapter on the German railway expansion of the 1970s and 1980s. Zeller offers a bold synthesis of environmental history and the history of technology, historical subfields that have enjoyed a closer alliance in Germany than in the United States. Both fields have largely avoided landscape because of its association with Romantic aestheticism and, more ominously, völkisch nationalism. Drawing on recent theoretical work in historical geography, Zeller rescues landscape as a category of environmental historical analysis, positing it as the physical and symbolic bridge between the realms of nature and technology. In Zeller's hands, landscape emerges as a zone of social and ideological conflict, rather than a picturesque refuge from urban ills. |
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The chapters devoted to landscape and the Autobahn network are the strongest and will elicit the most interest among environmental historians. In these sections, Zeller refutes the popular image of the landscape-friendly Autobahn by concentrating on the conflicts that emerged between roadway engineers and the so-called "landscape advocates" under Alwin Seifert, who desired naturalistic, curvilinear roads and indigenous vegetation in areas disturbed by roadway construction. Though their goals meshed well with Nazism's promise to purge German technology of "Jewish materialism," the landscape advocates' environmental aims remained almost wholly unrealized because of their uncertain status in the hierarchy of road building, the constant pressure to lower costs, and ceaseless conflicts among landscape advocates, highway engineers, and nature conservationists. |
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