One of the most powerful nationalist ideas in modern Europe is the assertion that there is a link between people and their landscape. Focusing on the heart of German romanticism, the Rhineland, Thomas Lekan examines nature protection activities from Wilhelmine Germany through the end of the Nazi era to illuminate the relationship between environmental reform and the cultural construction of national identity.

In the late nineteenth century, anxieties about national character infused ecological concerns about industrialization, spurring landscape preservationists to protect the natural environment. In the Rhineland’s scenic rivers, forests, and natural landmarks, they saw Germany as a timeless and organic nation rather than a recently patchworked political construct. Landscape preservation also served conservative social ends during a period of rapid modernization, as outdoor pursuits were promoted to redirect class-conscious factory workers and unruly youth from “crass materialism” to the German homeland. Lekan’s examination of Nazi environmental policy challenges recent work on the “green” Nazis by showing that the Third Reich systematically subordinated environmental concerns to war mobilization and racial hygiene.

This book is an original contribution not only to studies of national identity in modern Germany but also to the growing field of European environmental history.

Introduction  1
1    Nature's Homelands:
     The Origins of Landscape Preservation, 1885-1914  19
2    The Militarization of Nature and Heimat, 1914-1923  74
3    The Landscape of Modernity in the Weimar Era  99
4    From Landscape to Lebensraum:
     Race and Environment under Nazism  153
5    Constructing Nature in the Third Reich  204
Conclusion  252
Abbreviations 265
Notes   267
Sources  324
Acknowledgments   326
Index  328