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attention. It was hailed as a milestone by the contemporary conservation
commissioners of the states, regions, and administrative circles.
Against this background, it is hardly surprising that the official
nature conservation movement re-established under Allied occupation
and in the early Adenauer era was bathed in a diffuse, rightwing
light. Chaney points to personal continuities in the movement
which, under the terms of the RNG which remained in force, was
mostly run by educators and foresters, among others, acting in an
honorary capacity (see p. 129). They were initially dominated by the
old hands of the Nazi conservation movement, which included an
extended notion of protecting the landscape and well as actively
shaping it. For Hans Schwenkel, Heinrich Wiepking-Jürgensmann,
and also still for Konrad Buchwald, passive as well as creative nature
conservation was primarily a service to the nation, or even to the
‘German people’ (‘deutschen Volkstums’). To be sure, the national
substructure of the conservation movement was rapidly perforated
over time. Karl Arnold’s claim, made in 1956 on behalf of the
Deutsche Heimatbund, that plans to control the Mosel amounted to
a materialistic attack on the moral and idealistic nature of the people
could count on considerable public support at the time. Ten years
later, when grandad’s version of nature conservation had explicitly
been put to rest, it would merely have irritated even those with an
interest in the subject.
Chaney, well schooled in Konrad Jarausch’s theories of contemporary
history, shows that the objectification, technical and scientific
rationalization, and widening of horizons in thinking on nature conservation
which this reflects began in conservation associations that
were, to start with, extremely conservative. These included organizations
such as the Schutzgemeinschaft Deutscher Wald, the
Vogelschützer, the Verein Naturschutzpark, the Rat für Land pflege,
and others, which were joined by more and more local and regional
societies dedicated to maintaining their local natural environments.
Gradually, an idea of conservation oriented by the environment took
over. Favoured by a younger membership, the movement no longer
saw nature as an integral component of an organic whole, but began
to interpret it as the fixed point of an ecologically defined whole,
however this was quantitatively defined. With this change, new protagonists
and organizations came into their own. The Bund für
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