Pre-industrial forests in Central Europe as objects of historico ...

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technology increasingly natural and engineering scientific aspects come into the historians' debate on
the forest. This is evident in the monograph on wood by Radkau and Schäfer 63 published in the nonfiction
series of the German Museum in Munich. They have, in my opinion, written an easy to read
and richly illustrated forest history of Central Europe. Otherwise forest history questions are embedded
in general contexts and form only a section of the total production of a researcher. Kellenbenz, Schubert
and Allmann 64 all start by dealing with the forest. The forest is only marginally touched upon in
the project BERNHIST initiated by the historian Pfister 65 which attempts an analysis of the space/time
changes in population, economy and environment in the canton of Bern with the inclusion of data
processing with quantifying methods to regional energy balances; but Pfister's et al. 66 historic critical
study on the connection of climatic extremes and forest damage in Switzerland shows that in parts of
the debate on the forest motivated by historical science an increasing number of questions and fields
are being dealt with which, until now, were more likely to be found in silvicultural science or in geography.
A similar direction is taken by an anthology published by Bergier 67 which illuminates the importance
of mountains, rivers and forests as possible points of contact and obstacle.
Besides the mentioned disciplines linguistic science also contributes to research on forests in
the past. The basic etymological work by Trier on the simple coppice 68 and on feed foliage 69 should be
mentioned here. Again and again methods of old and more recent research on the forest in the past are
being examined: literature research 70 and music research 71 , art history 72 and ethnology 73 . It is interesting
that it is very often forest officials themselves who pursue such approaches with a view to the importance
of the forest for population and national culture 74 . Another forest official 75 edited the till now
probably most detailed regional documentation of old maps with silvi-historical content.
Before the outlined general, and altogether very rich background of research it is now time to
declare the past and possible contribution of geography in the future in general, and historical geography
in particular, to research on forests.