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Reviewed by:
  • Germany’s Nature: Cultural Landscapes and Environmental History
  • Frank Uekötter (bio)
Germany’s Nature: Cultural Landscapes and Environmental History. Edited By Thomas Lekan and Thomas Zeller . New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2005. Pp. 256. $54.95.

When U.S. environmentalists were debating William Cronon's attack on the prominence of wilderness in American environmental thought in the mid-1990s, Germans were following this discussion with a mixture of bemusement and irritation. What was so exciting about the idea that "wilderness" was essentially a cultural construct? Living in a country densely transformed by human agency for centuries, the search for wilderness seemed like an elusive endeavor. Since its inception, the German nature protection movement has focused on pieces of land that were anything but untouched nature, and German conservationists were often aware of this. So why did Americans get so excited about the idea that one should look beyond "wilderness"?

To their credit, Thomas Lekan and Thomas Zeller abstain from comments on the debate over Cronon's argument, for it would all too easily sound like Old World condescension. Instead, they are focusing on results, with a fine collection of essays tracing the cultural construction of landscape from multiple angles. As befits a subject as wide as the landscape, the range is impressive, spanning two centuries and topics as diverse as agricultural improvement, nature protection, and natural history museums. The volume even includes an article by Thaddeus Sunseri on forest use in German East Africa, mirroring a growing awareness among German historians [End Page 632] of the country's colonial past. From a history-of-technology perspective, the most intriguing essays deal with automobiles and drivers from Imperial to Nazi Germany (Rudy Koshar) and hydraulic engineers in nineteenth-century Prussia, which Rita Gudermann sees as contradicting Wittfogel's famous argument about the despotic potential of control over water resources.

In a treatise on the Germans as "a sylvan people," Michael Imort gives an overview on the cultural meaning of forests in Germany. Friedemann Schmoll traces the history of bird protection through the nineteenth century; Sandra Chaney compares nature protection in the two German states after 1945. It was perhaps inevitable that a volume of this kind would include an article on the Nazi era, though John Alexander Williams's discussion of the ideology of bourgeois conservation is somewhat disappointing, especially for an author who has produced landmark publications on the topic. The notion of a smooth merger between conservation and Nazi ideology is one of those myths of German historiography that will probably never die.

It would be too much to call this a concise introduction to German environmental history; after all, cultural landscapes have always been but one topic of German environmental historians, though a prominent one. The focus on landscapes makes for a remarkably coherent volume, though, something that cannot be said of many collections of a similar sort. If nothing else, this one gives an impression of the merits of transnational perspectives, underscoring how crucial it is to challenge the silent "nationalization of nature" (Richard White) that has been going on in environmental circles. It is somewhat irritating, however, that the volume starts off with complaints about the state of environmental history in Germany. If German environmental history is still out in the woods, how did it produce such a nice volume?

Frank Uekötter

Dr. Uekötter is Dilthey Fellow at the Research Institute of the Deutsches Museum, Munich. His most recent book is The Green and the Brown: A History of Conservation in Nazi Germany (2006).

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