The Making of the Modern German Landscape

Historically Speaking November/December 2006 David Blackbourn on The Conquest of Nature A SOCIETY'S ATTITUDE TOWARD NATURE CAN REVEAL MUCH TO THE HISTORIAN. A WONderful example ofthis is DavidBlackbourn 's latest book, The Conquest ofNature: Water, Landscape, and the Making of Modern Germany (Norton, 2006). Blackbourn, who is the Coolidge Professor ofHistory at Harvard, has written several important books, including The Peculiarities ofGerman History (with G. Eley, 1984); Marpingen: Apparitions of the Virgin Mary in Nineteenth-Century Germany (1994); and The Long Nineteenth Century: A History of Germany, 1780-1918 (1997). We invited him to write an essay exploring some ofthe themes ofhis new book, which Historically Speaking editor Donald Yerxa pursues a bitfurther in an interview conducted on October 4, 2006 in Blackbourn s office at Harvard's Minda de Gunzburg Centerfor European Studies. The Making of the Modern German Landscape David Blackbourn When German soldiers went off to war in 1914, patriotic writers told them they were defending the "great green garden " of their country. This was the cradle of national character; whatever cataclysmic changes the war might bring the landscape was reassuringly there, unchanging. Except, of course, that it wasn't. A German of 1914, transported back to 1750, would have been astounded at how different the "natural" landscape looked. Much less of it was cultivated, much more of it dominated by sand or scrub and especially by water. The 20th-century visitor would not need to journey far before stumbling upon ponds and lakes long drained and forgotten, or marshes that contemporaries likened to the wetlands of the New World, even to Amazonia. Filled with snaking channels half-hidden by overhanging lianas, these dwelling places of mosquitoes, frogs, fish, wild boar, and wolves not only looked but smelled and sounded quite different from the open landscape of canals and manicured fields familiar to 20th-century Germans. The great river valleys had been transformed as well. Unlike the modern artery, engineered to flow swiftly in a single channel between embankments , the 18th-century river meandered over its floodplain or made its way through hundreds of separate channels divided by sandbars, gravel banks, and islands. It ran fast or slow according to the season, not at a pace adapted to year-round navigation; and along the river on either side lay dense wedands forests. That was what the Rhine used to look like, the river in which Goethe fished for salmon and hundreds of people panned for gold. The Rhine that became the supreme symbol of German identity was a new and different river. The modern traveler in 1750 would have found many other things that have since disappeared. Great expanses of high peat moor remained largely untouched, not yet traversed by canals and given over to crops. And in the uplands of the Eifel, the Sauerland, and the Harz were hundreds of valleys later drowned by dams. Their fields and villages had not yet been covered by water, just as the waterlogged high moors had not yet been covered by fields and villages. I have written about this great transformation in a recent book, The Conquest of Nature: Water, Landscape, andthe Making of Modern Germany. "Conquest " was the term favored by contemporaries. The tone shifted over the years, from sunny Enlightenment optimism, to the stern 19th-century belief in science and progress, to the technocratic certainties that marked most of the 20th century. But the underlying idea remained, that nature was an adversary to be tamed and manacled; it was better to fight nature than fellow humans. This reminds us that for much of the last 250 years the conquest of nature was a cause identified with the swords-into-ploughshares optimism of progressive November/December 2006 Historically Speaking opinion. Yet, as I have tried to show, large-scale schemes of hydrological improvement were often the byproduct or the handmaiden of war. And that was true long before the unleashing of largescale Nazi projects for Eastern Europe that combined technocratic hubris with racial contempt for the peoples whose "disorderly" land had been seized. Here, race, reclamation, and genocide were intertwined, rhetorically and on the ground. At home, too, the conquest of nature could be equally well...