Cover
List of Maps
Dedication
Title Page
Preface
Introduction: Nature and Landscape in German History
Chapter One: Conquests from Barbarism
A Wilderness of Water and Marsh
The Lords and Masters of Nature
Colonists
Fields of Joy and Abundance
Paradise Lost?
Chapter Two: The Man Who Tamed the Wild Rhine
The Bells of Pfotz
Tulla’s Plan
Remaking the Upper Rhine
Winners and Losers
Chapter Three: Golden Age
The Jade Bay
Colonizing the Moors
The Triumph of the Steamship
Further Victories over the Powers of Nature
Chapter Four: Dam-Building
In the Wonderland of Technology
Otto Intze: ‘Grand Master’ of German Dams
Flood Protection, Navigation and ‘White Coal’
With Mastery of the Water Comes the Opportunity for Conflict
The Impact on Environment and Landscape
Drowned Villages, Broken Dams
Chapter Five: Race and Reclamation
A Grey-Dark Wilderness
Race, Reclamation and Genocide
Conservation and Conquest
The Mystique of the Frontier and the ‘Wild East’
Indian Wars
Chapter Six: Landscape and Environment in the Post-war Germanys
The Garden of our Hearts: The ‘Lost Lands’ in the East
The ‘Economic Miracle’ and the Rise of Ecology
Implementing the Transformation of Nature in Germany
Epilogue: Where It All Began
Picture Section
List of Abbreviations
Notes
Acknowledgements
Bibliography
Index
Copyright
To my grandparents
In loving memory
Water, Landscape and the
Making of Modern Germany
1. Prussia in the age of Frederick the Great
2. The Rhine basin
3. Baden in 1789 and 1815
4. The formation of the Jade Bay
5. The East Friesland Peninsula
6. Major areas of dam-building in unified Germany
7. The Pripet Marshes
8. Germany and Eastern Europe at the end of 1941
9. The Polish district of Kutno and the German planners’ alternative
10. Divided post-war Germany and the ‘lost lands’
I am very grateful to the following for permission to use illustrations: Bärenreiter Verlag, Kassel and Basel (1); Geheimes Staatsarchiv, Preussischer Kulturbesitz (2); Oderlandsmuseum, Bad Freienwalde (4); Jürgens Photo, Berlin (5); Kunstmuseum, Basel (6); Generallandesarchiv, Karlsruhe (7, 9); Reiss-Engelhorn Museum, Mannheim, photo by Jean Christen (8); Stadtmuseum, Oldenburg (10); Stadtarchiv, Wilhelmshaven (11); Staatstheater, Oldenburg (12); Niedersächsisches Freilichtmuseum (13); Landschaftsbibliothek, Ostfriesische Landschaft, Aurich (14); Verlag Haus am Weyerberg, Worpswede (15); Archiv der Stadt Remscheid (17); Hochschularchiv, TH Aachen, Fotosammlung (18); Deutsches Museum, Munich (21); Ruhrtal Museum, Schwerte (23); Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin, Bildarchiv (24); Ullstein Bild (25, 26); Bundesarchiv, Koblenz (27); Agnes-Miegel-Gesellschaft (30); Barbara Klemm, Frankfurt am Main (31).
The idea of writing this book goes back a long way, to California in the spring of 1990, when I was a visiting professor at Stanford University and began to read the work of American ‘New Western’ historians. That was when I drafted the first outline of the present work, which was to be the book after the book after the one I was then writing. Two years later I moved permanently to the USA. Research on the project was begun during a trip to Germany in 1995 and completed over the following years. The book was written between the end of 1999 and the beginning of 2005. I like to think it has benefited from this long period of gestation, but – to paraphrase the famous words of Mandy Rice-Davies – I would, wouldn’t I?
It is a pleasure to thank the many people and institutions who have made the book possible. My research was supported by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and the Clark Fund of Harvard University. I am grateful to Harvard University for periods of leave that allowed me to work on the book, and for providing an atmosphere of intellectual stimulation that I have come to treasure. I want to offer special thanks to friends and colleagues at the Center for European Studies and to my graduate students, past and present, whose commitment to the common enterprise of history has done more to sustain my sense of optimism than they probably realize. In Germany I have benefited from the continued support and hospitality of the Institute for European History in Mainz, where Andreas Kunz and Martin Vogt were especially helpful in the early stages of research. I am also very grateful to the friendly staff of the Generallandesarchiv Karlsruhe and the Staatsbibliothek Berlin, as well as to the libraries across Germany that made many hundreds of obscure printed materials available to me through inter-library loan. Closer to home, I owe a huge debt to the staff of the Houghton and Widener libraries at Harvard. I should also like to express my gratitude to a series of research assistants – Ben Hett, Kevin Ostoyich, Katharina Plück and Luise Tremel – who were efficient and good-humoured in helping with bibliographical research and the ordering of books and inter-library loan materials. Thanks also to Katja Zelljadt, who brought her remarkable energy to bear on the task of tracking down illustrations and permissions.
I have had the good fortune to be asked to talk about the material in this book to many different gatherings of historians and others. It would be hard to overstate how much I gained from these opportunities to formulate and discuss my ideas. The research was first presented at a conference on water held in 1998 at the Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik in Bonn, the first of four meetings devoted – an inspired notion – to the elements. In the following years, while the book was being written, I was able to try out my ideas in front of audiences in Oslo, Berlin and Vancouver, and at conferences, seminars and lectures across the USA from California, Oregon and Arizona to Florida, New Jersey and Washington DC. Many of those who encouraged me or helped me to work out what I really wanted to say were not German historians, or historians at all. Thanks go to them all. An even larger debt of gratitude is owed to those writers and scholars in a variety of different fields whose work I have read with profit. The notes at the end of the book indicate the size of that debt. I am, of course, solely responsible for any factual errors or wayward interpretations the book may contain.
It is a pleasure, finally, to thank those who have been closest to this book. I am grateful as always to my agents, Maggie Hanbury and Robin Straus, and to Will Sulkin and Jörg Hensgen at Jonathan Cape, for their support and confidence. My family, and a changing cast of quadrupeds, have lived with this book for a long time. I thank my wife, Debbie, and our children, Ellen and Matthew, for their patience and above all for their love. I also want to thank my parents for their loving support over so many years. Books are fed from many sources. This one was conceived and written in the country I now call home and it deals with a country where I have spent enough years to feel that its landscape is a part of my life. But, from the time I first set out to write it, this book has felt personal in ways that may go back even further. My wife says that the sight and smell of fenland or saltmarsh induce in me a kind of reverie. If she is right (and she usually is), then perhaps this book owes something to my earliest years in Lincolnshire. That is one of many reasons why the book is dedicated to the memory of my grandparents.
David Blackbourn
Lexington, Massachusetts
May 2005
When German soldiers went off to war in August 1914, Kaiser Wilhelm II promised that they would be home, victorious, before the autumn leaves fell. By 1915, soldiers and civilians alike were forced to recognize that Germany would not be able to impose its will on the enemy so easily. That year the writer Wilhelm Bölsche published a book on The German Landscape Past and Present. Bölsche was a prominent social reformer in early twentieth-century Germany, a popularizer of Charles Darwin and a founding member of the Garden City movement that promoted more green space in Germany’s expanding cities. The book was his contribution to the war effort, just one of many attempts to mobilize nature behind the national cause. A preface to the volume drove the message home. It was written by Franz Goerke, a fellow social reformer who combined an interest in popular scientific education with a passion for ‘green’ causes like nature conservation. ‘In this time of struggle and battle’, wrote Goerke, the German landscape was ‘the greatest thing we have to defend’.1 Here was a call to sacrifice familiar to millions of Germans who fought in the wars of the twentieth century. The landscape they were asked to defend was the ‘great green garden of Germany’, a homeland or Heimat whose meadows, woodlands and meandering streams were the cradle of German character and spirit.2 Whatever cataclysmic changes the war might bring about, the natural landscape – like the people it nurtured – was reassuringly there, unchanging.
Except, of course, that it wasn’t. A German of 1915 or 1940, transported back to 1750, would have been astounded at how different the ‘natural’ landscape looked – much less of it was cultivated, much more of it dominated by sand or scrub and especially by water. The visitor from the twentieth century would not have needed to journey far before stumbling upon pools, ponds and lakes long drained and forgotten. A complete loss of bearings would threaten the modern traveller in the low-lying marsh and fenland that still occupied so much of the North German plain in the eighteenth century. There was a reason why educated contemporaries likened them to the wetlands of the New World, even to Amazonia. Dark and waterlogged, filled with snaking channels half-hidden by overhanging lianas and navigable only in a flat-bottomed boat, these dwelling places of mosquitoes, frogs, fish, wild boar and wolves would not only have looked but smelled and sounded quite different from the open landscape of windmills and manicured fields familiar to twentieth-century Germans. The modern traveller in any German river valley would surely register the same feeling of being transported into a lost world. The river itself looked quite different in 1750. It did not even flow in the same places. Unlike the familiar modern artery, engineered to flow swiftly in a single channel between embankments, the eighteenth-century river meandered over its floodplain or made its way through hundreds of separate channels divided by sandbars, gravel banks and islands. It ran fast or slow according to the season, not at a pace adapted to the needs of year-round navigation. And along the river for miles on either side lay wetland forests, which had not yet given way to farmland and industrial installations. That was what the eighteenth-century Rhine looked like, the river in which Goethe fished for salmon and hundreds of people still sifted through the gravel for gold. The Rhine became the supreme symbol of German identity over the 150 years that followed, but it was a new and different river where the salmon and the Rhine gold had no place.
That was lowland Germany around 1750, much of it barely recognizable to twentieth-century eyes. Upland Germany had changed less, but still enough to shock our hypothetical traveller. Consider, for example, someone brought up in the twentieth century on the East Friesland peninsula, or in one of the many parts of Bavaria once covered by moorland. Great expanses of high peat moor that had formed over centuries remained largely untouched in 1750, not yet traversed by roads or canals and given over to arable farming. Only in a few places had peat-cutting started to change the appearance of regions that were still regarded with fear; for it was not until the moors began to disappear that Germans – some Germans – would learn to view them as ‘romantic’. Climbing higher still, into the uplands of the Eifel or Sauerland, the Harz or Erzgebirge, the traveller might encounter an even more poignant example of something that had since disappeared: one of the hundreds of valleys later drowned by dams. Their fields and villages had not yet been covered by water, just as the waterlogged high moors had not yet been covered by fields and villages. The German landscape was many things: unchanging was not one of them.
This book tells the story of how Germans transformed their landscape over the last 250 years by reclaiming marsh and fen, draining moors, straightening rivers and building dams in the high valleys. None of these human undertakings was entirely new. Cistercian monks had drained marshes in the Middle Ages and the first successful ‘cut’ to remove a bend in the Rhine was made in 1391. There were even dams of a kind hundreds of years earlier in the central mountains of Germany, built to provide a source of energy for draining mine-shafts – using water to raise water. What was novel after 1750 was the scale and impact of hydrological projects. They changed the face of the land as much as familiar and obvious symbols of the modern age like the factory chimney, the railway and the burgeoning city. Why were these measures taken, who decided on them, what were the consequences? Those are the questions that concern me. I have called this book The Conquest of Nature because that is how contemporaries described what they were doing. The tone shifted over the years, from the sunny Enlightenment optimism of the eighteenth century, to the earnest nineteenth-century belief in science and progress, to the technocratic certainties that marked so much of the twentieth century. (Read the utopian claims in 1900 about hydro-electric power, a clean and modern source of energy created by men in white coats, and it sounds just like the enthusiasm for nuclear power sixty years later.) What did not change is the basic idea that nature was an adversary to be manacled, tamed, subjugated, conquered, and so on through a dozen variations.
‘Let us learn to wage war with the elements, not with our own kind’.3 That was the Scot, James Dunbar, writing in 1780. His view that there was a just war to be fought against nature became a familiar refrain through more than two hundred years of German history. Dunbar’s contemporary, Frederick the Great of Prussia, who drained more marshland and fen than any other ruler of the time, looked down on the newly reclaimed Oder marshes and proclaimed: ‘Here I have conquered a province peacefully’.4 In the nineteenth century, moorland colonies and steamship navigation were the causes of progressive men. In the golden age of natural science, mastery over nature was supposed to mark the moral advance of humankind; it was the antithesis of war. This attitude persisted even into the catastrophe of the First World War, which many commentators saw as a break in the natural trajectory of human progress. When Sigmund Freud wrote his Thoughts for the Times on War and Death in 1915, he counted it among the ‘disillusionments’ of war that ‘our technical advances towards the control of nature’ had encouraged a belief in the peaceful settlement of human conflicts; for the civilized values of orderliness and law were ‘among the qualities which have made mankind the lords of the earth’.5 After the war the Marxist cultural critic Walter Benjamin offered a variation on the same theme, lamenting that ‘instead of draining rivers, society directs a human stream into a bed of trenches’.6 When it came to water projects, this swords-into-ploughshares optimism remained common ground among liberals and socialists well beyond the middle of the twentieth century.
The historical reality was rather different. More often than we like to think, draining a marsh or redirecting the course of a river was not so much the ‘moral equivalent of war’ (to use William James’s term) as the by-product, even the handmaiden, of war. Take the reclamation projects pursued by Frederick the Great. Draining marshes removed the dark haunts that harboured deserters and impeded Frederick’s clockwork army on its line of march. The canals and ditches were dug by soldiers, the settlement of colonists was overseen by former army suppliers. And the conquest of nature was undertaken, often enough, on territory that had been won by conquest of the literal kind. Or consider the unprecedentedly ambitious project to ‘rectify’ the Rhine in the nineteenth century, which would not have come about when and how it did if Napoleon had not helpfully simplified the political map of Germany by destroying the Holy Roman Empire, opening the way for the transformation of the river. Similar examples abound. Why did Prussian engineers and thousands of workers struggle for ten years against the North Sea and the malarial mudflats of the Jade Bay? To build a deepwater harbour for the Prussian, later the German, battle fleet. Why did the pace of moorland drainage and colonization accelerate after the First World War? Because Germans came to see themselves after the Treaty of Versailles as a ‘people without space’, a Volk ohne Raum, so that every cultivated acre counted. In their preparations for the next war the National Socialists carried this battle for food, which was simultaneously a battle against nature, even further. And after 1939 they developed hydrological plans for eastern Europe that combined technocratic hubris with racial contempt for the peoples whose ‘disorderly’ land they had subjugated. Race, reclamation and genocide were intertwined.
What generations of Germans called the conquest of nature could be described equally well with another military metaphor, as a series of water wars. And that was true at home as well as abroad. Water serves a very large number of human purposes. Rivers alone are a source of drinking water, and of water for washing and bathing. They irrigate crops and provide calorific energy directly in the form of fish. They flush away waste and serve as a means of transportation (a river is a road that moves, said Blaise Pascal). They provide water for cooling and other industrial processes. And they drive both simple water-wheels and complex turbines, this being an instance in human history where the wheel really was reinvented. Some of these many ways of harnessing the river are mutually compatible; but others are not. Every rearrangement of German hydrology described in this book, whether redirecting and diking a river, draining a marsh, digging a canal or building a dam, set rival users against each other. These were rupture points, when rivers and wetlands were remade to serve new interests. In the early years the conflict was typically between fishing or hunting and agriculture, later it was between agriculture and industry, later still between one powerful modern interest group (like inland shipping) and another (like hydro-electric power). Almost always there was a clash of some kind between local or small-scale claims and larger interests; and almost always it was the big battalions who came out on top. As one of Germany’s leading dam experts remarked: ‘With mastery of the water comes the opportunity for conflict over it’.7
Achieving that mastery depended on modern forms of knowledge: maps, charts, inventories, scientific theory, the expertise of hydraulic engineers. It was also a measure of political power. These transformations of the German landscape were coercive. Germany’s water wars were sometimes overtly violent. Fenland fishing communities resisted their displacement; so did small boatmen driven off the river by steamships. They were met with military force. Open violence waned after the middle of the nineteenth century (except when Germans were rearranging other people’s waterways), and the domestic water wars moved into the law courts, parliaments and ministerial offices. But what the French call ‘soft coercion’, or violence douce, was always there in the background. Look at how German waterways were remade, and you see where the lines of power ran. The human domination of nature has a lot to tell us about the nature of human domination.
But this book also tells a story of consent as well as coercion. For all the fierceness of debate about a given canal or dam, over who would pay and who would benefit, there was a remarkably long-standing consensus among politicians, lobbyists, officials and opinion-makers on the underlying principle that German waters could be reshaped at will. Could be – and should be. The elite was not alone in taking this view. Mastering nature came to be widely seen as natural – or ‘second nature’, as we say. There was popular enthusiasm for the great civil engineering projects that changed the shape of the land. It was evident in the speeches that accompanied every festive inauguration of a newly completed river correction or dam, the lionizing of celebrated engineers like Johann Tulla and Otto Intze, and the tremulous tone adopted by mass-circulation family magazines when reporting on these triumphs of human ingenuity. When Dr Jakob Zinssmeister, an advocate of harnessing hydro-electric power, wrote in 1909 that ‘mankind is after all there to dominate nature not to serve it’, he was only stating what most people believed.8 It is often said that modern Germans were less amenable to ‘modernity’ than the British or French, less worldly and materialist, more hostile to mechanical civilization. This has been presented as one explanation for the appeal of National Socialism. If you believe that, I hope this book will make you think again.
Not that the right of humans to assert their mastery over nature went unchallenged. If Jakob Zinssmeister’s comments seem rather insistent, even impatient, that is because they were made in response to conservationists who questioned the impact of dam-building on the local landscape, flora and fauna. The dam was a new cause of concern; the underlying disquiet was not. Poets and naturalists had worried about human arrogance even in the eighteenth century. Doubting voices multiplied in the noisy ‘age of progress’ that followed. The sceptics had different reasons for questioning the dominant, instrumental view of humankind’s relationship with the natural world. For more than two centuries the most persistent basis for concern was (and perhaps still is) aesthetic. From the lamentations of Romantic poets to the pressure-groups of the twentieth century that tried to block hydro-electric projects, the threat to the natural beauty of the landscape took centre-stage. Another concern was already being expressed when the first proposals to remake the Rhine were unveiled in the early 1800s. What if the remedy proved worse than the disease? What if – terrible thought – it was human actions themselves that led to ‘natural’ disasters? Both concerns, the aesthetic and the practical, had human interests at their core, even if it was a view of human interests different from Jakob Zinssmeister’s. Other Germans had religious grounds for questioning the human right to ‘improve on creation’. The decline in bird species that followed the loss of wetland habitats animated much of this concern, for ornithology was a popular pursuit in Germany. Bird protection societies were formed earlier than in most other countries and enjoyed huge support. Then there was a final contrarian strand of doubt, one that would become increasingly important in the future. In 1866, German physiologist Ernst Haeckel coined the term ‘ecology’. This marked the emergence of a body of thought that forced humans to confront their complex interrelationship with other species. Germans made a pioneering contribution to modern ecological ideas; and it was the study of aquatic species and habitats that propelled much of the new thinking.
These Cassandras were diverse; they are hard to pigeon-hole intellectually or politically. A German nature conservation movement emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century, but it was not a direct forerunner of the environmental activism that recast German politics eighty years later. The earlier movement shared some of the ecological concerns that drove the Greens, but it was more preoccupied with landscape aesthetics and more conservative. After 1933 the movement entered into a passionate but mostly unrequited love affair with National Socialism, and some of the same attitudes (often espoused by the same people) persisted into the post-war years. Where the later Greens were committed to ‘think globally, act locally’, earlier nature conservationists tended to their local ‘homeland’ regions but within a strongly nationalist, often racialist framework. Even the adjective ‘green’ is an unreliable indicator if it leads us to imagine a straightforward continuity of environmentalist beliefs. In the first half of the twentieth century, as in the nineteenth, ‘green’ was often a code-word for German superiority: ‘German and verdant’, as opposed to the Slav ‘desert’ or ‘wilderness’. ‘The German village can only ever be a green village’ wrote one Nazi landscape planner.9 His view, which combined landscape aesthetics, ecological concern and racial pride, was shared by most conservationists. The modern Green movement has constructed for itself (as movements do) a pre-history of prophets before their time, and there are certainly connecting threads; but the line connecting past and present was more broken than continuous.
To write about the shaping of the modern German landscape is to write about how modern Germany itself was shaped. Anyone trying to do it is faced today with two very different ways of framing the story. Call them the optimistic and pessimistic approaches, one an account cast in the heroic mode, the other a modern morality tale of just deserts. The first tells a straightforward story of progress. Growing human control over the natural world meant new land for colonization and more food to support a growing population; it removed the scourge of malaria and checked the age-old threat of floods; it provided safe drinking water and a new source of energy through the retention of the waters of upland streams; and it brought freedom from the confines of closed-off local worlds by removing obstacles to communication, speeding the flow of people and goods along previously twisting rivers as surely as steamships drove through ocean sea lanes. This is a story of emancipation from constraints, bringing short-term losses for a few but long-term gains for the many. Until about a generation ago, when ‘modernization’ and the gospel of progress began to lose their lustre, this was the upbeat register in which the story was usually told. It’s getting better all the time sang the Beatles in 1967, and most historians would have sung along.
That is the optimistic version.
Few historians still write this way. Attention has shifted to the darker side of progress. The ‘conquest’ of water led to a decline in biodiversity, and (the other side of the same coin) brought damaging invasive species, the algaes, molluscs and more ‘adaptable’ fish that established themselves in already damaged eco-systems. Hydrological projects also wiped out human communities, and with them valuable forms of local knowledge: carefully calibrated ways of living with and from the water. Every benefit of progress had its price: the water-borne pollution from industry and chemical fertilizer that caused fish-kills and human health hazards, the vulnerable monocultures introduced on newly cultivated land, the lowering of water tables caused by wholesale drainage. Old constraints and insecurities were removed, but new ones took their place. The city fathers who built reservoirs a century ago boasted that they had increased water use, but they had also established a pattern of unchecked consumption that is simply unsustainable. Dams, for whatever purpose they were built, often failed to deliver the goods, but they did present later generations with unforeseen problems. The habit of treating river basins as a series of gutters and drainpipes to speed the water on its way was perhaps the most obvious instance of how technocratic water management had unintended consequences. Increase the velocity of a river and its tributaries, confine that river within a narrow channel and encourage human settlement on the former flood-plain, and what you have done is exchange regular local flooding for less frequent but far more extensive and damaging inundations – although, as we have seen in the many ‘once in a century’ floods on the Rhine, Oder and Elbe since the 1980s, these have become quite frequent enough.
That is the pessimistic version.
Neither way of framing this history is really satisfactory. Both tell a one-eyed tale. Even in our age of sound-bites and simple story lines, with its inbuilt bias against complexity, it is surely still possible to hold two contradictory ideas in our heads. These German passages to modernity were, like Dickens’s French Revolution, the best of times and the worst of times. The conquest of nature was a kind of Faustian bargain. Faust laboured to tame the threatening waters, to create new land by ‘bringing the earth back to itself’, and he succeeded – but at a price.10 (In Goethe’s play it is the elderly couple, Philomen and Baucis, who pay the price: early ‘victims of modernization’.) Both gains and losses were real; it depends which groups you look at and the time-scale you adopt. That is not an argument for splitting the difference, simply the starting point for an honest reckoning. The evidence in this book suggests that it was usually the poorest and most powerless who made the greatest sacrifices in the cause of material betterment. The immigrant labourers and convicts who dug canals before 1914, the foreign prisoners of war who drained moorland in the First World War, and the slave workers who did both of those things and more under grotesquely inhumane conditions in the Second World War represent an extreme version of that generalization. But it is also true that in Germany, as in other European countries, the costs of large hydrological projects were not shunted on to the poor as they so often have been in the modern Third World. The transformation described in this book brought great material benefits to most Germans: new land, a regular supply of clean water in the household, water transformed into energy or used in industrial processes that made mass consumption a reality. The Faustian bargain is still in place, but now it takes a different form. Over the last two hundred years, and at an accelerating pace in the twentieth century when war did not intervene, Germany made the transition from a world where most people lived very short lives that were constantly exposed to insecurity and material constraints, to an ageing society that enjoys an ease unprecedented in human history – a society with the luxury of examining its own prodigal ways, although many (myself included) would argue that doing so is actually a necessity rather than a luxury. That is surely the real question now about the long-term consequences of manipulating and mechanizing German water resources. It is the question of sustainability. When do ‘needs’ become ‘wants’, and who will decide which wants deserve to be satisfied? And those who reject the thinking behind that question have to answer another one: Can things go on the way they have been without a hard reckoning in the future? As the last two chapters of this book suggest, Germans have been more willing than most to face that question.
This concern is at the root of present-day pessimism, which has taken on a different quality since historians began to pay attention to species other than humans, when they placed human history more squarely within the history of the world that people inhabit: the lithosphere, the atmosphere and – not least – the hydrosphere.11 The ‘pessimists’ in the debate that once raged over the social consequences of the Industrial Revolution were not pessimistic about the future of humankind. They wanted to expose the inequities of past human societies, but looked forward to a fairer distribution of material resources in the future. Doubts about the wisdom of subjugating the natural world to human uses did not enter the argument. That has changed. The very projects that once symbolized a future of human emancipation – like the huge Soviet hydrological projects on the rivers that fed the Aral Sea – can now be seen as human and environmental catastrophes. It is impossible for any book dealing with long-term changes in human relations with the natural world not to be overshadowed in some way by the serious global crises we face today – climate change, growing rates of species extinction, ‘desertification’, and the gloomy long-term future of the world’s fresh water supply. Readers of this book will find many examples of the negative environmental effects brought about by the hydrological revolution in Germany – drainage projects and river ‘corrections’ that created mini-dust bowls by drying out the land (and caused the coining of a new word, Versteppung), widespread loss of wetlands and species, habitat fragmentation on an ever larger scale, irreversible changes of the kind ecologists call ‘Humpty-Dumpty effects’.12
So why do I nonetheless find a ‘pessimistic’ account inadequate? Partly because we can point to other changes that were reversible and have in fact been reversed over the last thirty years, notably water-borne pollution and the whole German approach to flood control in river basins. There are, moreover, instances where the outcome of human interventions has been paradoxical, like the reservoirs that became links in the flyways of migratory birds and are now managed as valuable eco-systems in their own right. This is a modest German variant on a global story, most dramatically illustrated by the Salton Sea in the American south-west, a disaster of human hydrological engineering gone wrong that now attracts more bird species than anywhere else in the continental United States. A history that takes the environment seriously is bound to turn up warnings from the past, but it is likely to be bad history (and probably unhelpful for grasping our present-day problems) if it is nothing but a jeremiad. The history of humans and the natural world is bound to be morally charged, which makes it all the more important to retain a feeling for historical irony. Not everything is or was a downward glide to perdition.
The almost religious sense of a ‘fall’ in some writing about human relations with the natural world is palpable. Humankind has transgressed, has lost its innocence and been expelled from Eden. It has even – a figure of speech drawn from later in the Book of Genesis – been branded with ‘the permanent mark of Cain’ for its murderous attack on nature.13 In most history books the sense of a fall from grace is, of course, much less insistent than this. Still, the habit of mind is familiar enough that thoughtful environmental historians have found it worth reflecting on.14 It is not a stance I find very helpful, and the call to embrace an ‘unblemished’ nature that so often goes with it is even more problematic. No one has stated the issue more trenchantly than the American environmental historian Richard White:15
To call for a return to nature is posturing. It is a religious ritual in which the recantation of our sins and a pledge to sin no more promises to restore purity. Some people believe sins go away. History does not go away.
Can that history be told other than through human eyes? Many non-human species find a place in the following pages, from the humble caddisfly to the salmon, from the wolf which Germans largely succeeded in exterminating in the eighteenth century to the Bacillus thuringiensis which ate its way through so many fields of German maize in the twentieth century. But I have not tried to tell the story that follows from the perspective of any of these species – and if I had, it would be no more than a form of ventriloquism. The perspective of this book is resolutely human and anthropocentric. I have not (as Arnold Toynbee once did) given speaking roles to plants, although I have drawn on a wonderful book by Ernst Candèze that relates the building of a dam through the eyes of an enterprising group of beetles, ants and grasshoppers who felt the consequences.16 I do not believe that we could (as one American environmental historian has suggested) ‘think like a river’, even if we wanted to.17 I write as an all too human observer, a chastened progressive old enough to remember when things were getting better all the time but now more often tempted by the thought, equally unhistorical, that they are getting worse all the time. A desire to show readers the contradictions of Germany’s passage to modernity gives this book its underlying rhythm, its point and counterpoint.
The book is built on a series of dramatic episodes that allow us to recover what contemporaries thought they were doing (or trying to prevent someone else from doing). That is a way to counter the pervasive sense of inevitability that coats the past as soon as it becomes the past. Those I have called optimists and pessimists both have a tendency, from their opposite perspectives, to make the process of change seem too straightforward, too smooth and self-evident. I have tried to restore a sense of the options that confronted people at the time, to show the grit and friction that was evident in every one of these episodes. But the longer perspective is necessary as well. All history is the history of unintended consequences, but that is especially true when we are trying to untangle humanity’s relationship with the natural environment. Flash-forwards allow us to see how often contemporary expectations were confounded. Whether the effects in a given instance were for better or worse (or both), remaking German rivers and wetlands was not only arduous and ambiguous but unpredictable. This book is full of examples. We regularly encounter engineers trying to fix problems that were problems only because the previous fix had not worked. And every time their mantra was the same: This time things would be different! Score one for the pessimists. But the same point also cuts the other way. What nature conservationists wanted to conserve at any given time was the status quo at a particular point between one set of human interventions and another – the residue of yesterday’s ‘progress’, after it had acquired a patina of ‘naturalness’. If the apostles of progress were too often dazzled by the once-and-for-all solutions of the present, environmentalist critics have too often painted an unrealistic picture of the past, attributing pristine qualities to habitats that had long carried the traces of human use.18 That argument, and the many ironies that flow from it, is one that runs like a red thread (or perhaps it is a green thread) through the book. The point was unwittingly made by the moorland painter Otto Modersohn, who confided to his diary that ‘nature should be our teacher’, then noted that this not very original thought occurred to him ‘on the bridge that leads over the canal’.19
This book is full of people looking down, like Modersohn, on German waterlands, although usually from a greater height than the bridge over the canal. These observers provide us with a series of ‘before’ and ‘after’ snapshots of the German landscape. We know what the labyrinth of the old Oder marshes looked like thanks to a seventeenth-century engraving that frames the view from the surrounding heights; then, a hundred years later, Frederick the Great looked out proudly over the reclaimed land that stretched before him, the ‘beautiful garden’ of later cliché. Hundreds of miles to the west, unaware that he was recording a world that would soon disappear, Peter Birmann painted an Upper Rhine we no longer recognize; he was followed in the nineteenth century by a host of observers who looked down over the plain and saw (as August Becker did) a land ‘so fruitful and luxuriantly green … that it seems like one great garden’.20 In just the same way, clergymen and conservationists gazed down and wrote elegies to river valleys that would soon be drowned by dams, then yielded their place to the technocrats and travel writers who celebrated a different panorama and a new kind of beauty – the ‘reservoir romanticism’ that is still alive in aerial photographs of shimmering man-made lakes in the Eifel and Sauerland.
Like the privilege of hindsight, these elevated perspectives are valuable, but they do not tell the whole story. They do not tell us what it meant on the ground when the ‘before’ turned into the ‘after’. You can see a lot of things when you look down at them from above, but you miss a lot as well. So I have also made a point of going down to ground and water level: to the fisher people whose lives are so easy to sentimentalize when they are seen from a great height, the construction workers who paid with their health (and sometimes their lives) to accomplish the feats that others rhapsodized about from a distance, the farmers on reclaimed fens who took generations to establish themselves and were never free from the fear of flooding, the moorland colonists whose lives were no less precarious. Writers like to think they are in charge, but there are things in the writing of any book that creep up behind the author’s back and insinuate themselves. In this case it was the mud that took me by surprise: in chapter after chapter there were people up to their waists in mud. I have not tried to clean them off: the idea was always to offer multiple perspectives, and this one is important. Readers can expect a book that takes them up to the heights, but also down to where the earth meets the water.
These are more than just differences in perspective, more even than a shorthand for different social experiences. They are two different ways of saying that history occurs in space as well as time. Real space and imagined space. The landscapes that feature in the title of this book come in two kinds. There is the cultural construct framed by the observer; and there is the physical reality of rock, soil, vegetation and water. Germans distinguish between ‘nature’ (a cultural projection of human ideas and emotions) and ‘nature in itself’ (the complex of life-forms on earth, which includes humans).21 When I write about the making of the modern German landscape, it is in this double sense. The two meanings complement each other. They represent two halves of a single history.
Human beings are metaphorical creatures. We think of time, and we represent it as a river. ‘Time is a violent torrent’, said Marcus Aurelius. Machiavelli used the same idea when he wrote in The Prince that history, or fortuna, was like ‘one of those violent rivers which, when they become enraged, flood the plain, ruin the trees and buildings, lift earth from this part, drop it in another’.22 It was already a cliché when the eminent German historian Leopold von Ranke claimed in the nineteenth century that history ‘flowed’ like a river, adding that historians were caught up in the ‘irresistible current’ but tried to ‘master’ it. The metaphorical instinct works the other way round as well. We see a river and we turn it into a source of myth and legend. That is as old as the river valley civilizations of the Euphrates, Nile and Ganges. Modern Germans also fashioned their waterlands into repositories of cultural and political meaning. Artists, writers, historians, travellers, politicians, planners – all invested the German landscape with symbolic values, and I have tried to show the variety of ways in which they did so. The Rhine, at once Romantic, fruitful and ‘German’, is only the best-known case.23 Everywhere we look, German rivers, moors and fens became markers for larger, more abstract things: conquest and loss, of course, the twin themes of the book, but many other qualities besides, both positive and negative – beauty and ugliness, abundance and scarcity, harmony and disharmony. During the nineteenth century it is particularly striking how often Germans came to map their own imagined virtues onto the landscape. Many historians have devoted themselves in recent years to these mental topographies, and with good reason. What we call landscapes are neither natural nor innocent; they are human constructs. How and why they were constructed (many would say ‘imagined’, even ‘invented’) belongs to the stuff of history.
But when I read yet another book or article about an ‘imagined landscape’, it is sometimes tempting to complain, like Gertrude Stein, that ‘there’s no there there’. And I want to ask: Are all topographies in the mind, is every river nothing more than a flowing symbol? There was a time when a sharply physical sense of place was an essential ingredient of history. Peter Heylyn, a seventeenth-century English writer on religion and history, made the point with commendable vigour in 1652: ‘Historie without Geographie like a dead carkasse hath neither life nor motion at all’.24 Some of the most celebrated historians of the nineteenth century would have agreed. Think of Thomas Babbington Macaulay in England; or of Jules Michelet, who wrote in his History of France that ‘without a geographical basis, the people, the makers of history, seem to be walking on air, as in those Chinese pictures where the ground is wanting.’25 In Germany, home to the great pioneers of geography as a discipline, historians took the same line. Heinrich von Treitschke is most often associated with stirring political narratives about the rise of Prussia. But his pages contain much more interest in the contours of the land than those who have not read him (or read him only for the plot) imagine.
By the 1920s, it is true, professional history had come to define itself increasingly by the practice of document-based research, leaving vulgar geography to local antiquarians and popularizers. Nowhere was that more true than in Germany. But the revolutionary challenge mounted by historians associated with the French journal Annales (founded in 1929) changed all that. They insisted that the physical environment was more than just an empty stage on which humankind performed. The greatest of them, Marc Bloch, taught that human history was to be found not only in the archives but ‘behind the features of landscape’.26 This new departure (or return to an older wisdom) was not just a Gallic affair. It had its counterparts in Britain, the United States and Germany. A belief that the historian should possess a pair of stout walking shoes transcended national borders, then and for some years to come.
Now it sounds faintly old-fashioned. Electronic media have supposedly left us with ‘no sense of place’.27 We associate those stout walking shoes with people of a certain age, like the venerable French historian Georges Duby, looking back wistfully to the days when he walked the countryside and examined ‘a document … open to sunlight and to life itself, namely the landscape’.28 But things were changing even as Duby wrote these words in 1991. Historians and the general public have both shown a renewed interest in places and landscapes. The growing popularity of books on environmental history and the natural world suggests that a shift is taking place. Restoring the connection between the broad sweep of history and the physical environment opens up new perspectives. While researching this book, I walked many of the landscapes it describes and this only enhanced my appreciation for the sheer scale of the transformation that humans imposed. I also became convinced that the book should make use of what geographers, botanists and ecologists had to say. Making inferences from pollen analysis or mapping changes in species are, of course, also ways in which humans impose meaning on the natural world. The taxonomies are ours. Rivers flow and do their work whether or not people are present. That is to say, they do what we call ‘flow’ and ‘work’: the river has no name for these things, which are human constructs every bit as much as saying that the river has been ‘conquered’. But looking closely at what happened when that flow and work were radically altered by human actions is still a very different enterprise from showing how Germans came to view a landscape as harmonious, or ordered, or quintessentially German.