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SANDRA CHANEY, Nature of the Miracle Years: Conservation in West
Germany, 1945–1975, Studies in German History, 8 (New York:
Berghahn Books, 2008), xii + 284 pp. ISBN 978 1 84545 430 2. $85.00
£42.50
The history of the Federal Republic has frequently been interpreted
as a process of liberalization or Westernization, as a path to the West
successfully taken. The social and political renunciation of authoritarianism
or totalitarianism in favour of a relatively unambiguous
and general acceptance of pluralistic norms, different ways of life,
and constitutional realities which these and similar concepts describe
(a number of publications could be cited as evidence for this), can be
correlated, relatively precisely, with the development of the West
German conservation movement. Sandra Chaney, Professor of
History at Erskine College in Due West, South Carolina, takes up this
analytical thread in an original and, on the whole, convincing way.
Her study combines a reconstruction of conservation intentions and
measures for the whole of West Germany between 1945 and 1975
with a number of case studies, closely based on the sources, which
confer a certain transparency on the changes and upheavals in this
field. They deal, in chronological order, with the conflict about the
Wutan Gorge in south Baden, the debates on controlling the river
Mosel, and the controversies surrounding proposals to expand the
Bayerischer Wald national park.
This stringently narrated investigation, whose arguments are
always to the point, begins with a brief account of conditions at the
start of the West German conservation movement. Chaney tellingly
points to the continued impact of a long-lived tradition uniting the
legacy of the classical and now well-researched view of nature, which
looked at landscape in aesthetic terms and was infused with the ideology
of Heimat, and the brutal topoi of the civilizatory pessimism of
imperial Germany. Overblown racial doctrines were by no means
foreign to this tradition. Beyond this, the author concentrates on the
projects aiming to create a natural landscape including technical
installations and resources for energy production (Leistungs land -
schaft) which, after hesitant beginnings in the Weimar Republic,
reached a first peak in the Nazis’ genocidal plans for the incorporated
and occupied Eastern regions. The Reichsnaturschutzgesetz (RNG),
a conservation law put through by Hermann Göring, receives critical
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