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Book Review
| Germany's Nature: Cultural Landscapes and Environmental History. Edited by Thomas Lekan and Thomas Zeller. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005. v + 266 pp. Map, notes, index. Cloth $54.95.
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| Germany's Nature is a collection that demonstrates the environment's role in the formation of German identity between the period of unification and the Nazi Gleichschaltung. National myths that claimed a special bond between Germans and their forests, developing views on the natural ideal, socio-political developments, and concrete aspects of the landscape all interacted to influence the shifting formation of German identity during this period of modernization with consequences for the German people, the German environment, and the world. With its focus on the creation of a real and symbolic German topography and German culture on the eve of Nazi ascendancy, Germany's Nature forms a welcome companion to the collection How Green Were the Nazis? (also edited in part by Thomas Zeller). But while that book focuses on Nazi environmental policies, Germany's Nature better succeeds at environmental historians' goal of depicting the interplay between culture and tangible landscapes. |
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In a standout essay, Michael Imort describes this interplay. Germany's forested environment, he explains, inspired a cultural tradition, well-established by the late nineteenth century, that identified Germans as a distinctly "Sylvan people." Around that time, a school of foresters sought to replace scientific forestry, with all its regular lines and monocropping, with what it perceived to be a more organic "back to nature" forestry. Through practicing this forestry that mimicked natural processes, there was the potential to educate German society, according to these foresters. A natural forest was supposed to provide an instructive analogy of a healthy Germany. In the early twentieth century, Germans writing about their forests introduced more ominous interpretations of back-to-nature forestry, with the strong, organic German forest standing for the collective strength and unity of German society. Jews, predictably, were compared to exotic, parasitic species. Ultimately, Göring himself took up the völkisch analogy of the new German forestry for its propagandistic potential. With its Nazi associations, back-to-nature forestry fell in repute after the war with consequences for Germany's forests. |
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Sharing themes with Imort, Suzanne Kostering's fine essay on natural history museums describes how curators projected Germanness onto animals and how animals, taxidermied and arranged in exhibitions, were meant to provide lessons from German nature to German society. First, museums naturalized political boundaries and characterized the animal species within them as natural to Germany. Then, museums' depictions of the animals in recreated habitats reinforced desirable perceptions of the German homeland and people: Tableaus of animal families conveyed ideas about peace and order, other arrangements reinforced ideas about gender roles and separate spheres. |
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The editors of Germany's Nature convey an admirable ambition to move German environmental history literature out from under the dominance of the history of environmentalism, and much of the book serves their goal. But the final section of the book on the history of environmental movements and policy hampers their project. On balance, though, the contributions are true to the editors' expressed goals of showing the complex interplay between cultural landscapes and German society. Written in clear, jargon-free prose, the book will be accessible and valuable to environmental historians of any region and time, historians of modern Germany, and other professional and graduate student readers. |
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John Broich is visiting assistant professor of European environmental history at Amherst College in Amherst, Massachusetts. |
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