Agrarmodernisierung und okologische Folgen: Westfalen vom 18. bis zum 20. Jahrhundert (review)

This ambitious volume aims to advance the historiography of German agriculture by incorporating it into and enriching it with the methods and findings of environmental history. In Germany, agricultural history has been on the sidelines for decades, not least because the very essence of its subject matter, the soil, is uncomfortably close to Nazi slogans like "Blood and Soil." Whether this stigma was fair is outside the scope of this review or the volume at hand. Suffice it to say that, since the late 1990s, a new generation of historians has been revitalizing the discipline in German-speaking countries.

Agrarmodernisierung und ökologische Folgen is a significant part of these efforts. The volume contains no fewer than twenty-nine papers given at a conference in the Westphalian city of Münster in 2000. While some of these deal with rather parochial topics, quite a few pose provocative questions for agricultural history and environmental history and are therefore also of interest to historians of technology. Due to the length of the book, this review can touch only on a handful of these contributions.

In their introduction, the three editors rightly criticize agricultural history for having remained under the implicit or explicit influence of progressivist ideology—which meant downplaying the local knowledge of farmers in favor of that of the agricultural scientists who emerged during the Enlightenment. Historians affirmed the viewpoint of these experts all too readily by relying on their testimony as source material, and in fact agricultural history was closely aligned with agricultural science and ideology. On the other hand, the editors of this volume are correct in pointing out that German-speaking environmental historians have long neglected agriculture because of their preoccupation with cities and urban pollution. In order to bring the two disciplines together, the editors address four areas of inquiry: the consequences of agriculture for local ecosystems; the question of whether an ecological equilibrium existed before modernization in the nineteenth century; the impact of modernization on ecosystems; and changing perceptions of agricultural landscapes.

The essays by Rita Gudermann and Karl Ditt provide good examples of what this new agricultural history has to offer. Gudermann believes that a certain ecological equilibrium did exist before the modernization of agriculture, and yet she insists that social relations in villages and small towns were far from harmonious. Guderman also posits that the debates on ecological crises should be seen as essentially political, and that the takeoff phase of agricultural modernization was parallel to industrialization and not driven by it. Ditt provides an overview of the ecological changes wrought by agriculture in Germany over the last two hundred years, including the changes in the color of the land due to the switch from blue flax to yellow rapeseed. In neglecting agriculture until the 1970s, German conservationists effectively ignored more than half of the country's land area.

While Jürgen Büschenfeld analyzes how pesticides were evaluated and used both before and after Rachel Carson's wake-up call (the importance of which he considers overestimated), Andreas Dix examines the history of sewage farming, the distribution of human feces as fertilizer on tracts of land outside cities, a practice that reached its peak in the early twentieth century. Hygienic and aesthetic concerns led to its demise, with a brief resurgence under the Nazis. Today these fields are highly contaminated.

Willi Oberkrome's essay deals with Flurbereinigung, land consolidation by state agencies that has reshaped German agriculture in the last seventy years. Though his discussion of the altercations between technocrats and conservationists is insightful, it would have been useful to know more about the farmers involved, especially since planners (and apparently Oberkrome, too) thought them to be "ignorant" (p. 525.) The relevance of landscapes for tourism is the subject of a refreshing essay...