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2. Rejuvenating Socialist Workers: Conservation and Landscape Care in the 1950s
- University of Michigan Press
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49 Chapter 2 Rejuvenating Socialist Workers: Conservation and Landscape Care in the 1950s In 1954, a West Berlin newspaper reported that East German authorities had proposed a national park in the beloved forests of “Saxon Switzerland” to the south of Dresden. The proposal, in the journalist’s opinion, revealed the growing penetration of a centralizing regime into every nook and cranny of everyday life. In a sense, the reporter was correct; as the previous chapter revealed, sports authorities did hope to transform and control the leisure practices of rock climbers and hikers in Saxon Switzerland. Dresden’s day-trippers, he wrote, “Seem intent on weekends to enjoy some small amount of freedom from the regime’s harsh regimentation.” He concluded, “No wonder the functionaries are concerned.”1 This particular piece of Cold War propaganda got quite a bit wrong, however . The newspaper’s attack on the SED obscured the highly controversial nature of the national park proposal, which authorities ultimately scuttled as a threat to economic growth. A national park did not fit very well into the plans of a regime that embraced a Soviet-style growth of heavy industry. Propaganda campaigns in the 1950s celebrated steel factories and coal mines while glorifying austerity and individual sacrifice for the collective good, and the regime, in part to pay reparations to the Soviet Union, also rapidly expanded mining and timber harvesting with little consideration of long-term environmental consequences .2 In part due to these policies, authorities struggled with a growing exodus to West Germany of skilled workers and professionals tired of austerity and scarcity. In 1953, construction workers even instigated a strike in East Berlin that sparked a widespread revolt eventually put down by Soviet tanks and the East German police. One response to the 1953 uprising was the growth of the secret police, or Stasi, into a formidable surveillance force, but the regime actually tacked rather nervously between concessions to workers and 50 The People’s Own Landscape purges of reformers. After 1953, the regime implemented a “New Course” that paid more attention to workers’ benefits and even briefly adapted cultural policy to better reflect popular desires, especially among the young. The regime thus very publicly promised a higher quality of life and even tentatively promoted consumerism alongside heavy industry. Josef Stalin’s death in 1953 and successor Nikita Khrushchev’s hope that the GDR would serve as a model of socialist modernity only encouraged the new thinking about consumer goods. Before 1958, however, the SED and its economic planners remained very uncomfortable with consumer desires and feared the influence of the consumer culture emerging in West Germany. At that point, the regime preferred to respond to popular unrest through lower food and housing prices that demanded ever greater transformations of the natural environment to benefit industrial agriculture and forestry, thus making a national park nearly impossible even if the SED had no other reason to oppose it.3 Still, the reporter was not completely off base about the park proponents. He correctly identified the park as a control mechanism, but he oversimplified the origins and intent of those controls. Park proponents failed to convince the SED of the park’s necessity, but they too had a desire for control—to protect nature against abuse by businesses and vacationers, to mold citizens into productive citizens uncorrupted by Western consumer decadence, and to rationally transform the land for optimal economic efficiency. Like their counterparts at the heights of political power, landscape architects saw, in the words of James C. Scott, “like a state.” Scott argues that modern states, whether socialist or capitalist, subscribe to a high-modernist ideology that demands the mastery and simplification of nature to expand production and satisfy the needs of citizens .4 Outright opponents of socialism or authoritarianism rarely appeared in bureaucratic debates; such antagonists retreated into silence or moved to the West. The protagonists of this chapter saw like a state and thus accepted the legitimacy of the new regime insofar as it offered greater opportunity than the capitalist West for constructing a “healthier” society. It would be easy, given the GDR’s environmental record, to write the history of conservation and landscape planning with an eye toward totalitarianism theory, but this chapter will insist instead that the statist embrace of authoritarian planning fit into a history of German conservation that did not begin or end with Nazism or Stalinism. Following totalitarianism theory, historians stress either the Stalinist tone of landscape planning or the overlap...