An Interview with David Blackbourn

November/December 2006 * Historically Speaking An Interview with David Blackbourn Conducted by Donald A. Yerxa Donald Yerxa: What prompted you to write Conquest of Nature ? David Blackbourn: I've been gnawing away at the question of progress for years. This goes back to my first book on Catholic politics in southern Germany before World War I. And there is a chapter called "Progress and Its Discontents " in my history of 19th-century Germany. In some ways the new book is a working through of some of those same questions on different terrain— literally different terrain. I can actually date the genesis of this book. It was during the 19891990 academic year when I was a visiting professor at Stanford. I was already interested both in landscape and in water. What really fused these interests and made me want to write this book was living in California. In fact, I wrote the first notes for it then. I was overwhelmed by the physical landscape, and I also read the works of the new Western historians, like Patricia Limerick, then shortly afterward William Cronon and Richard White, all of whom had quite an influence on me. Yerxa: You argue that Germans thought of nature as something to be tamed and conquered. Were Germans unique in this regard? Blackbourn: Given the very persistent idea that modern Germans from the Enlightenment onward were much less given to materialism, much less worldly, more inward—Germany the land of poets and thinkers, and so on—we might have expected them to have been unusual in not doing as much as other Western nations to conquer, master, and manacle nature. The view that there was a particular kind of German antimodernism into which the Nazis were able to tap has often been seen as one of the explanations for National Socialism. What I say in the book is that if you are someone who believes that the Germans were antimaterialist and inward and not of this world, dien have I got news for you. I put it a bit more politely than that, but I hope this book will help to give the reader a different picture of Germans since the 18th century. So in some ways the story is that they weren't so unique. Yerxa: How necessary was this aggressive approach to nature for a Germany that had aspirations of great power status? Were there other viable options? Donald Yerxa and David Blackbourn at Harvard University. Photo by Blake Marshall. Blackbourn: What Frederick the Great did in the 18th century in Prussia or what the Badenese government did to die Rhine in die first half of the 19di century had little to do with German nationalism. That clearly changed at some point after the middle of the century and certainly after 1871. The bombastic sense of pride in German scientific and technological prowess became very much intertwined with the idea of the German nation and its increasingly powerful place in the world. It is very hard to diink of alternatives being formulated in the 1 9th or 20th centuries. This was also the case well beyond Germany—for the other Western European powers, for the Soviet Union, and then for new Third World nations after 1 945. They followed the same industrial path, which included a commitment to navigable rivers, modern agricultural methods, and perhaps above all high dams and hydroelectric power. Maybe the Russian populists of the 19th century or Gandhi in India offered alternatives , but they were very much the outliers. Yerxa: Had the Nazis won the war, what would have been the environmental impact on Eastern Europe? Blackbourn: That is an unusually productive counterfactual question because it gets to a major debate diat is going on as we speak. Simon Schama in Landscape andMemory (1996) and Anna Bramwell in Ecology in the 20th Century: A History (1989) put forward the argument that the Nazis' inhumanity toward humankind was matched paradoxically with respect for the natural world. So we have die "green Nazis," the tree-hugging Nazis. Eliminate the people, but preserve the forests. That's a position that has been challenged by what is now a large literature over the past ten...