E-Book Overview
One of the most powerful nationalist ideas in modern Europe is the assertion that there is a link between people and their landscape. Focusing on the heart of German romanticism, the Rhineland, Thomas Lekan examines nature protection activities from Wilhelmine Germany through the end of the Nazi era to illuminate the relationship between environmental reform and the cultural construction of national identity. In the late nineteenth century, anxieties about national character infused ecological concerns about industrialization, spurring landscape preservationists to protect the natural environment. In the Rhineland's scenic rivers, forests, and natural landmarks, they saw Germany as a timeless and organic nation rather than a recently patchworked political construct. Landscape preservation also served conservative social ends during a period of rapid modernization, as outdoor pursuits were promoted to redirect class-conscious factory workers and unruly youth from "crass materialism" to the German homeland. Lekan's examination of Nazi environmental policy challenges recent work on the "green" Nazis by showing that the Third Reich systematically subordinated environmental concerns to war mobilization and racial hygiene. This book is an original contribution not only to studies of national identity in modern Germany but also to the growing field of European environmental history. (20050401)
E-Book Content
Imagining the Nation in Nature
Imagining the Nation in Nature Landscape Preservation and German Identity, 1885–1945
Thomas M. Lekan
H A R VA R D U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S
Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England 2004
Copyright © 2004 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lekan, Thomas M. Imagining the nation in nature : landscape preservation and German identity, 1885–1945 / Thomas M. Lekan. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-674-01070-1 (alk. paper) 1. Landscape protection—Social aspects—Germany—History—20th century. 2. Landscape—Psychological aspects—Germany—History—20th century. 3. National socialism and science. I. Title. QH77.G3L44 2003 333.72⬘0943⬘0904—dc22
2003056641
Contents
Introduction 1
1
Nature’s Homelands: The Origins of Landscape Preservation, 1885–1914
2
The Militarization of Nature and Heimat, 1914–1923
3
The Landscape of Modernity in the Weimar Era
4
From Landscape to Lebensraum: Race and Environment under Nazism
5
Constructing Nature in the Third Reich Conclusion Abbreviations Notes Sources
252 265
267 324
Acknowledgments Index
328
326
153 204
99
19 74
Imagining the Nation in Nature
Rhin e Cleve
e Lipp
rs Nie
ESSEN
Westphalia
Ruhr
Ruhr
Krefeld
Netherlands
Ba rm en
DÜSSELDORF M.-Gladbach
Solingen
Rh ine
er Ro Jülich
COLOGNE
t Erf Düren
Sieg
Sieg
AACHEN
r Ah LaacherSee
ine Rh
Belgium
Siebengebirge
Lah n
EIFEL REGION
Bonn
EupenMalmedy
Province Hessen Nassau
KOBLENZ
l se Mo Cochem
Bingen Bernkastel
Nah e
Luxembourg
Hessen
Saar
Bir ke nfe ld
Trier
Rhine
ll Ky
MAINZ
l se Mo
Worms
Kaiserslautern
sel Mo ar Sa
SPEYER
Palatinate
Saarland SAARBRÜCKEN
Zweibrücken
Saar
Rhine
France
N