A Greener Vision of Home: Cultural Politics and Environmental Reform in the German Heimatschutz movement, 1904-1918

Environmental History, Jan 1999 by Chaney, Sandra

A Greener Vision of Home: Cultural Politics and Environmental Reform in the German Heimatschutz Movement, 1904-1918. By William H. Rollins. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997. x 332 pp. Illustrations, tables, notes, bibliography, index. $54.50.

In A Greener Vision of Home, William Rollins assets that cultivating an aesthetic appreciation of the natural surroundings and cultural traditions of one's native region, or Heimat, was an essential first step in the evolution of ecological awareness in Germany. Relying on the theory of hegemony developed by the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci, Rollins maintains that the broad-based, middle-class Heimatschutz movement (literally, the movement to protect the native homeland) challenged the dominant capitalist culture by sensitizing the public to the importance of an aesthetically pleasing Heimat. In the early twentieth century, when few criticized urbanization and industrialization and when little scientific research on environmental problems was available, the Heimatschutz movement encouraged contemporaries to envision an alternative to the exploitative relationship between society and nature that was all too common under capitalism.

Rollins maintains that the Heimatschutz movement, which numbered 30,ooo by 194, was more liberal and central to conservation in its early years than has been acknowledged. The movement inherited aesthetic judgments from German Romanticism in particular, and appropriated Friedrich Schiller's belief that an individual's moral character was influenced by living in pleasant surroundings. Accordingly, Heimatschutz organizations advocated urban planning, city parks, housing reform, and the protection of everyday rural landscapes in their entirety (as opposed to preserving only remote "exceptionally scenic" ones) in the paternalistic desire to shape the moral character of people of all social classes.

Using the familiar language of nationalism that appealed to shared values associated with the national community, the Heimatschutz movement criticized economic growth that benefited a few wealthy individuals and challenged exclusive private property rights that restricted access to once-public places. Members supported legislation that thwarted development projects which threatened to disfigure urban and rural areas. Through publications, members pointed out the harm to plants and animals of straightened streams, forest monocultures, and fields with hedges removed. These "anti-modern" activities, Rollins argues, indicate that the movement pursued a modern course in encouraging the public to participate in an emergent environmental culture that contested the dominant utilitarian way of life. Rollins concludes by explaining how the Heimatschutz movement grew more conservative after World War I and succumbed to National Socialism in the early 1930s.

Some readers will question whether or not the Heimatschutz movement was as liberal as Rollins maintains and may tire of the author's rather abrupt references to hegemony theory in advancing his argument. Rollins needed to grapple with the question of how influential Heimatschutz publications actually were, and could have done more to address the issue of subjectivity inherent in an aesthetic argument for environmental reform.

These shortcomings do not detract from the strengths of the study. Relying on new material from several state archives and an impressive variety of published sources, Rollins offers a fresh perspective on the Heimatschutz movement and its contributions to early German conservation. Readers will be interested in his comparisons between Germany and the United States (a topic unfortunately introduced in the last six pages) and his discussion of how England's John Ruskin and William Morris influenced the Heimatschutz movement. Most engaging is his argument that "the main historical carrier of . . . environmental concern was a finely tuned and cultivated aesthetic sensibility" (p. 61).

Reviewed by Sandra Chaney. Ms. Chaney is Assistant Professor of History at Erskine College, where she teaches environmental and modern European history. She is currently working on a book about conservation and environmentalism in postwar West Germany.