Even in the best of times Europe is expensive and people are obsessed with conserving resources and funds—especially Berliners who are militant about it

The Chris Abraham Show

Scholars of German history, literature and cultural studies have created a long and rich scholarly tradition analysing the adoration of ‘nature’ in German Romantic, nationalist, Heimat, youth, and Lebensreform movements. Political scientists have also produced a voluminous literature on the origins and significance of Germany's Green Party and the ‘post-material’ values of the post-1968 generation. Germany is also well-known for its commitment to sustainable industrial development, as evidenced by one of Europe's best records in recycling, the regulation of industrial emissions and nature conservation. Yet ‘environmental history’, at least this field as understood among its North American practitioners, has remained underdeveloped among German historians until very recently. Franz-Joseph Brüggemeier's pioneering studies of air and water pollution control in the Ruhr area were part of a growing interest in Umweltgeschichte in Germany during the 1980s and early 1990s, but these did not immediately spawn a new generation of imitators. German environmental history has begun to mature rapidly in the first decade of the twenty-first century, however, spurred on by Mark Cioc's The Rhine: An Ecobiography, which introduced readers to a new kind of ‘history from below’ in which water, floodplains, forests and fish are active agents of political, economic and social transformation. David Blackbourn's prize-winning The Conquest of Nature, a magisterial survey of river canalization and wetland reclamation from Frederick the Great to the Federal Republic, stands out as one of the most influential books on German history published in 2006. It was the subject of a German Studies Association forum that engaged geographers, historians of technology and German historians in a fruitful conversation. The relationship between ecology, economy and culture remains at the centre of these and other new works, as well as contentious debates about the uncomfortable association between early twentieth-century nature conservation (Naturschutz) and National Socialist Blood and Soil policies, especially in occupied Poland during World War II. German History has invited five scholars to discuss the state of this new field: Dorothee Brantz (Centre for Metropolitan Studies, TU Berlin), Bernhard Gissibl (University of Mannheim), Paul Warde (University of East Anglia, UK), Verena Winiwarter (Klagenfurt University, IFF, Austria, and former President of the European Society for Environmental History), and Thomas Zeller (University of Maryland, USA). Thomas Lekan (University of South Carolina, USA) formulated the questions.

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