The German Forest: Nature, Identity, and the Contestation of a National Symbol, 1871–1914 by Jeffrey K. Wilson (review)

The German Forest presents a multifaceted view of cultural and social politics in the Wilhelminian period through analyses of debates on the meanings and roles of the forest. In contrast to prevailing ideas about the forest in modern German thought as embodying romantic, antimodern tendencies, Jeffrey K. Wilson contends that the forest assumed multiple meanings, some of them contradictory. Wilson aims to correct views of the forest that derive from a focus on the history of ideas by offering an expansive investigation into the ways the forest figured as a cultural practice at local, regional, and national levels. His research into the works of “foresters and botanists, geographers and historians, lawyers and politicians, poets and painters, nature preservationists and urban reformers” (5) reveals a shared reverence for the “German forest” that leads to conflict as industrialization and urbanization threaten that forest’s sustainability.

Arguing that the “German forest” is a modern construct, Wilson begins by demonstrating its importance for strengthening sentiments of national unity after 1871. The educated bourgeoisie, for instance, sought to create unifying national symbols, such as the forest, that would aid in cultivating a German national character, one that would “supersede the traditional bases of political loyalty—the royal houses and established churches of the individual German states” (18). Bourgeois writers further strengthened the symbolic appeal of the forest by advocating hiking and wandering as means of making the forest tangible to broad swathes of the population. Indeed, because forests covered more than a quarter of German territory in the late nineteenth century, traversing them offered opportunities to encounter the different landscapes and peoples of the empire, and through these experiences to become better integrated into the nation. Woodland excursions also brought wanderers into contact with monuments reminding them of the epic past, such as the Hermann Monument in the Teutoburger Wald. Notions about the need to experience and preserve the forest as a way to connect to a common past found their greatest resonance among the bourgeoisie. Wilson also cites a survey of working-class attitudes to show a much different perspective on the forest. The respondents either had little interest in the woods or echoed idealist notions about them espoused in bourgeois publications or romantic poetry. Yet this latter, more appreciative group did not associate the forest with the German nation.

Such diverging sentiments multiply as different groups argue over how to preserve and how to profit from the nation’s forests. Conservative nature lovers advocated preserving access to the forests as a means of combating social unrest and decay; agrarian reformers promoted forest preservation as a way to stop rural flight to the cities; nationalists wanted all Germans to have access to the forests to uphold feelings of national solidarity; wealthy landowners strove to prevent public access to their woodlands and to profit from them by using modern methods of management. Wilson makes clear that these varied opinions undercut the Sonderweg interpretation of German history, according to which backward-looking Prussian Junkers manipulated nationalist sentiments among the general populace away from movements for social change and towards external threats and internal scapegoats (50). Wilson’s research reveals that nationalists, for example, did not support the Junkers’ efforts to privatize the forests. They, along with conservative agrarian reformers and urban social reformers, challenged the Junkers’ efforts to restrict community rights of access. The disputes among the different groups do not fit into the commonly used categories of modern vs. antimodern in much of the scholarship on the Kaiserreich. All of the stakeholders regarded their efforts as modern: “Junkers modernizing property rights, agrarian reformers modernizing peasants into sustainable small farmers, social reformers modernizing the living conditions of urban workers, and Heimat activists and radical nationalists modernizing the concept of the nation state and national identity in their own unique ways” (51).

After having made a strong case...