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Book Review
| Agrarmodernisierung und oekologische Folgen: Westfalen vom 18. bis zum 20. Jahrhundert. Edited by Karl Ditt, Rita Gudermann, Norwich Ruesse. Paderborn, Germany: Ferdinand Schoeningh, 2001. xi + 812 pp. Illustrations, maps. List of contributors, bibliographies. $128.00.
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| Editors Ditt, Gudermann, and Ruesse have set themselves an ambitious goal. The book, a compilation of papers given at a conference in September 2000, aims at combining the two perspectives of agrarian and environmental history. It tries to foster a new understanding of the transition from an agrarian to an industrial society since the late eighteenth century, and the consequences of this transition for the environment in Westphalia, a region in northwestern Germany. Thirty authors from different disciplines look at a variety of aspects of rural life and work, including agrarian modernization, land consolidation, pesticides, rural tourism, agrarian politics, the rural economy, historical geography, and regional and landscape planning. In most cases, the synthesis of the perspectives works well and provides for a more comprehensive picture of environmental change. |
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The book also places the regional case study of Westphalia in the larger context of German agricultural history. Authors call for an ecological perspective to be added to the classical theories of historical demography (Gehrmann) and to the analysis of the take-off in agriculture (Gudermann). In his discussion of the impact of agriculture on the environment in the twentieth century, Ditt illustrates the interdependence of industrialized agriculture, mass consumption, and the global market and analyzes the reactions of farmers and agricultural legislators. |
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The main part of the book examines the effects of agricultural changes in Westphalia. Authors analyze the effect agricultural modernization had on the forest, the content of agricultural education, and the use of chemical substances, to name just a few. Bueschenfeld's article on pesticides in agriculture since 1945 does a wonderful job of reading "agrarian history as environmental history." He questions the effect of integrated pest control and critically discusses agrarian politics as well as the reaction of the public and agrarian interest groups to the long-ignored ecological damages. |
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A second set of articles in this part looks at changes in regional planning and landscape. The different case studies vary in their degree of clarity, but they all show that the transformation did not follow the same pattern all over Westphalia. Local factors determined agricultural and ecological changes, and it would be a mistake, according to Brakensiek, to uniformly assume an "ecological history of loss." In fact, biodiversity was higher in the nineteenth century than it had been in the Middle Ages, since the pace of industrialization and intensification of agricultural production varied regionally and allowed a variety of biotopes to coexist. These "ecological advances" of the transitional period, however, came to an end in the early twentieth century. The biggest damage was done during the 1950s, when the accelerated structural change caused irrevocable problems for the environment. Kuester's essay on changes in vegetation illustrates this case most poignantly. He argues that conservationism should not aim at preserving a status quo that itself is only the result of manmade changes, but has to allow a degree of dynamism. |
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Articles in the third part deal with the reception and discussion of environmental change in Westphalia. Radkau raises intriguing questions in his introduction, but not all of them are discussed in the following articles. The problematic concept of an endemic conflict between environmentalists and agriculturalists is certainly an important topic that deserves more attention. Radkau's suggestion of the Third Reich as an era in its own right within environmental history stimulates curiosity, but the articles hardly fill this void. A noticeable exception is Haepke's essay that examines the effects of the Nazis' environmental legislation (the 1935 Reichsnaturschutzgesetz) in the Ruhr area. His more general discussion of the relationship between environmental protection and agriculture belongs at the beginning of the book. Haepke's article is also one of the few that discusses long-term continuities up to European environmental policies in the 1990s. |
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In a captivating discussion of the Green Party's viewpoint, Ruesse analyzes the Greens' ambivalent agrarian vision in the context of their environmental program. German agrarian politics, however, needs to be placed in the European context, and milestones such as the European agrarian reforms of 1992 and the "Agenda 2000" could be explained further. Ruesse concludes that the impact of Green agrarian politics remained small in part because the party could not shed its urban character and looked at agriculture only through the lenses of the consumer or environmentalist. Ruesse could not foresee that the biggest crisis in industrialized agriculture, the Mad Cow Disease, would bring a green politician, Renate Kuenast, to the post of the minister of agriculture. |
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The volume ends somewhat abruptly with a theoretical discussion of models for future research. Winiwarter's discussion of important terms in environmental history is valuable but would have been more useful earlier on in the volume. The perspective that she calls for has been used in this book, and in this sense it provides some sense of conclusion. |
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Overall, the collection provides a good insight into recent trends in German environmental history and takes a lead by embarking on a truly interdisciplinary approach to understanding historical change. The size, price, and language of the book will limit its use as a class text in American graduate seminars, but every research library should have it as a valuable reference book for scholars and serious students with proficiency in German. Despite its length, some topics or periods receive little attention. The focus is on the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; much less attention is given to developments during the twentieth century. While it could be argued that periods such as the Weimar Republic or the Third Reich lack decisive turning points in regards to agricultural and environmental developments, this is certainly not true for the 1950s. As several authors acknowledge, the most radical changes occurred during this decade. Also the European context needs to be included, since the agricultural market was the first one to be unified and the European discussion of a feasible farm size ("Grow! Or leave!") had severe implications for the German landscape. This suggests that scholars need a new model for periodizing environmental history, one that emphasizes the 1950s and also focuses on European integration. But as it is, the book is certainly already long enough. This impressive, massive volume fills a niche and leaves room for further research on German environmental history. |
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Reviewed by Gesine Gerhard, assistant professor of European history at the University of the Pacific in Stockton, California. Her research focuses on German agricultural history. |
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