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Book Review
| Imagining the Nation in Nature: Landscape Preservation and German Identity, 1885–1945. By Thomas M. Lekan. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004. 334 pp. Illustrations, map, notes, index. $49.95.
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| In the years immediately preceding the Second World War, Thomas Lekan suggests, German landscape preservationists believed they were living in a "golden age of environmental concern." The Reich Nature Protection Law (RNG) of 1935 appeared to be "the most stringent and comprehensive environmental protection law in the world" (p. 168). It established more than eight hundred nature protection regions, covering almost three thousand square kilometers, and fifty thousand natural monuments by 1940. For German environmentalists, the RNG seemed to confirm "the advantages of Nazi authoritarianism over Weimar democracy" (p. 170). The law was, moreover, "surprisingly free of references to race or blood" (p. 192). |
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Eventually the grim realities of National Socialist rule would show the RNG to be a hollow sham—the law contained important exemptions for military installations and "vitally important economic concerns" (p. 207)—and those preservationists who had looked to the Nazis to curb the environmental abuses of Weimar's market economy would come to discover that Hitler's state was "a far greater menace to landscape preservation than private industry" (p. 205). Even so, Lekan's absorbing book illustrates very well how German landscape preservationists could have welcomed the Nazi era "as an opportunity to envision an alternative modernity, freed from the irrational chaos of liberalism, which balanced nature and tradition within the contours of an urbanizing, mobile, and increasingly affluent society" (p. 176). |
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Lekan's book, based on his doctoral dissertation at the University of Wisconsin under Rudy Koshar, traces the evolution of conservationist and preservationist discourses in Germany—or more precisely in the Rhineland—from the late-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, although it is the later chapters, which focus on the Nazi era, that are the most original and interesting. Chapter Four examines the "uneven" Gleichschaltung of landscape preservation organizations; while Chapter Five analyzes the discrepancy between the Third Reich's environmentally friendly image and the reality of massive environmental destruction caused by the regime's other policies. In these chapters, Lekan challenges both Jeffrey Herf's "reactionary modernism" thesis and those, such as Anna Bramwell, who have sought to portray Nazi environmental policy as a precursor to modern Green movements. He argues convincingly that it was not völkisch anti-modernism that fuelled nature preservation's synchronization with the Nazi regime, but a "modern, therapeutic approach to landscape planning," which preservationists believed "would help to create a new harmony between development pressures and ideal interests" (p. 175). |
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This book will be of interest to specialists in both German history and environmental history. The former will probably gain more from it than the latter, although Lekan does suggest that "American environmental historians interested in alternatives to the wilderness tradition in Western society will benefit from studying Germany's environmental history" (p. 15). The book, which has no bibliography, is crisply written, although the author has not been well served by his copy editor. The comparatively large number of typographical and spelling errors—"Godesburg" (p. 37); "Kreuzburg" (p. 48); "Elba" (p. 233); "socialiability" (p. 270); Enstehung (p. 2 74); "Bräggemeier" (p. 278); "Rosenburg" (p. 332)—do not, however, undermine what is an absorbing and well researched book. |
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Matthew Jefferies is senior lecturer in German history at the University of Manchester in the UK. He is the author of Politics and Culture in Wilhelmine Germany. The Case of Industrial Architecture (Berg, 1995) and Imperial Culture in Germany 1871-1918 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). |
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