The People’s Own Landscape: Nature, Tourism, and Dictatorship by Scott Moranda (review)

Many of us will remember images and documentaries on the environment of east central Europe in the late 1980s. Forests were dying from acid rain, giant dams were destroying faunal habitats, and radioactive clouds were floating above the skies of Europe. To counter the governments’ thirst for ever-larger industrial projects, ordinary individuals protested on the streets. The classic version of this story is one of environmental people power challenging the omnipresent state, but Scott Moranda’s study goes beyond that familiar narrative.

Moranda’s strength lies in his ability to challenge traditional understandings of the relationship between environmentalism and state socialism. For instance, Mary Fulbrook argued in Popular Discontent and Political Activism in the GDR, (1993; 265–282) that authorities in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) repressed individuals who expressed their concern about the environment. To the contrary, the author argues that conservationists worked with the government—or at least tried to— to preserve nature and foster its growth. For instance, many conservationists had a long history of promoting controlled development and restrained use before the founding of the GDR. The author shows how landscape architects like Reinhold Lingner—who worked on memorials for the casualties of World War I after 1918— went on to engage with conservation after the founding of the GDR. This focus on individual actors is refreshing.

Some readers may be disturbed by the lack of breadth in Moranda’s study: he focuses not on the GDR but mostly on Saxony—specifically on the Erzgebirge and Saxon Switzerland. Readers interested in the huge industrial projects and environmental decline in regions like Eisenhüttenstadt or Schwedt should look elsewhere. That said, Moranda correctly observes that this region was exemplary for all of East Germany. Enthusiasts for mountain climbing and wild backpacking flocked to the GDR’s south even before World War II to enjoy nature. After the war, activists for nature and recreation had to compromise with the state’s desire to scientifically use land. As Moranda shows, at stake in this collaboration was the attempt to enjoin Erholung (recreation) with landscape cultivation.

In this regard, East Germany was in fact very similar to Western countries. Even in the Federal Republic, individuals had to fight with large companies to protect their forests and valleys. Environmental historians of east central Europe like Eagle Glassheim have emphasized that a major trope after World War II was being a “shepherd of the land” (Heimat a jeho dlouhý stín, 16–19). This pattern was as true in Czechoslovakia, which had to legitimize the expulsion of millions of ethnic Germans—as described by Glassheim in Ethnic Cleansing, Communism, and Environmental Devastation in Czechoslovakia’s Borderlands, 1945–1989 (2006: 65–92)—as it was in France and Italy, which made labels to protect specialized artistry and agricultural products. Moranda’s work does recognize such global trends, and particularly his conclusion focuses on comparisons with other Eastern Bloc countries (182).

Crucially, the author documents dozens of cases detailing how those who had the best intentions—either toward the state or society—faced reprisals and hurdles when they tried to improve environmental plans on their own. These were not dissidents, at least initially: many of the scientists were firmly socialist. The problem was that the regime did not treat Eigeninitiative (individual initiative) as a positive characteristic, even if the person who exhibited it was a believer. Moranda does well to point out how the conservationists genuinely believed in the modernist project to cultivate nature so as to serve industry and recreation. But the calculus of the state system remained unchanged: when challenging the state, officials charged that conservationists were politically suspect and disloyal to the state (60–63).

An important contribution of the volume is to show how politics was still political, even in the most totalitarian of states. Moranda follows divergent actors to show how, for example, the forestry department virtually lobbied against conservationists’ attempts...