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Wald

by Susanne Fuchs

It is an often-stated fact that the forest occupies a special place in German cultural history. For the Environmental Humanities, it provides a particularly fascinating research topic because of its cultural and ecological multi-modality. As a landscape, the German forest offered a visual and (for hikers) experiential realm for identification—a feature utilized by artists, writers, and national ideologists alike. As an economic resource, it propelled the development of human ecosystem management and the ‘scientification’ thereof, leading to the German export of forestry methods and ideas. These two histories informed, among other things, the ecological ethos and concern, which is often referenced as part of Germany’s ‘green’ self-image. 

Given the broad variety of disciplines that the topic spans (literary studies, environmental history, political anthropology, landscape studies, economics, etc.), the body of relevant materials is vast. The following entry will only shine two spotlights on this wide field: it focuses on nationalist discourses and their aftermath (1), and examines forests as an economic resource and, relatedly, a site of management, control, and social and economic struggle (2). The numerous examples named throughout this article are meant to compensate for the limited scope and invite further exploration.  

(1)

From an international standpoint, the Brothers Grimm are without a doubt the best-known writers on the German forest. Their fairy tales are filled with forests (Märchenwald is a word in its own right in German), but their writing goes far beyond the forest as a preferred setting as it locates the origin of German customs and poetry in the woods and relates this alleged origin to a desired national unity: the preface to the journal Altdeutsche Wälder (1813) establishes a metaphorical connection between the German forests, history, and culture; the preface to the collection Kinder- und Hausmärchen (1819) understands this link literally (Schubenz 2020, 153-55).

Other writers of the same period draw similar connections, citing historical sources often transfiguring them for purposes that range from mildly sentimental to fiercely nationalist. Especially the text Germania (approx. 98 a.c.) by the Roman historian Tacitus plays a central role in the 18th/19th century cultural imaginary, featuring a mythical German past. It presents the German tribes as braving an inhospitable landscape made up of forests and swamps in a depiction that is in no way as unambivalently positive as the frequent German citations may suggest. Equally eminent are references to ancient Germanic tribes’ victory over the Romans in the battle of Varus taking place in the vicinity of Teutoburg Forest in 9 AC. Heinrich von Kleist’s Herrmannschlacht is arguably the best-known, but only one of numerous interpretations of the theme.

In the mid-19th century, Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl’s Land und Leute (1854) enjoyed a wide reception in German-speaking lands. This volume continued to emphasize the link between landscape and people and further catered to related nationalist sentiments. The political instrumentalization of such discourses was taken to extremes by the National Socialists and is well-documented in Simon Schama’s seminal Landscape and Memory (1996). A curious culmination of forest-specific nationalist propaganda that is still easily accessible today is the propaganda film Ewiger Wald, which premiered in 1936.

Writers and artists after 1945 found themselves tasked with working through this discursive history. An illustrative example is Anselm Kiefer’s Varus (1976), which features a dark forest scene sprinkled with red color and inscribed with the names of prominent German cultural figures. The painting is often read in juxtaposition with Caspar David Friedrich’s Der Chasseur im Walde (1814) symbolically representing French defeat at the end of the Napoleonic wars. In the poetic genre, the numerous responses to Bertolt Brecht’s “An die Nachgeborenen" remain troubled by the relationship of fascism, the discursive instrumentalisation of ‘nature,’ and, increasingly, environmental destruction. Paul Celan, Günter Eich, Erich Fried, Adrienne Rich, Hans Christoph Buch, and others take up again and again the famous lines “Was sind das für Zeiten, wo / Ein Gespräch über Bäume fast ein Verbrechen ist” and adapt it to post-1945 realities.

In the second half of the 20th century, the impact of mounting environmental pressures on the broader German consciousness finds more public expression, most prominently in responses to acid rain and nuclear power. Literature and art continue to link these emerging concerns to previous decades and centuries of German history. The forest- and fairy tale excerpts in Günter Grass’ novel Die Rättin (1986), for example, refer to Grimm’s cultural legacy while also responding to the threat of acid rain. Joseph Beuys’ tree-planting artivism 7.000 Eichen (1982) is commonly understood as born out of environmentalist concerns. Beuys’ himself, however, describes it as an “enterprise of regenerating the life of human kind” (DeMarco, Beuys 1982, 42), which invites an interpretation that understands the artwork in its historical situatedness.

By the beginning of the 21st century, the climate crisis looms large and ecosystems earn sufficient prominence to be writers’ sole object of concern. Paradigmatic is the popular science book Das geheime Leben der Bäume (2015) by the forester Peter Wohlleben, which became a New York Times bestseller. While the foreword to the English translation celebrates the text’s proximity to fairy tales, German-speaking and US critics and scientists alike demand “Fakten statt Märchen – Wissenschaft statt Wohlleben,” as a 2017 post on OpenPetition.de puts it.

(2)

One may detect resonances of the second strand of German ‘forest history’ in this demand, as German-speaking territories were European forerunners in establishing forestry as an academic discipline. Forestry as a Wissenschaft is closely linked to forest management and to reforestation as an economic necessity. The oldest book on the topic, Hannß Carl von Carlowitz’ Sylvicultura oeconomica, was published in Leipzig in 1713. The first forstliche Meisterschule opened its doors in Wernigerode (district of Harz) in 1763, the Berliner Forstakademie was founded in 1770 (Uekötter 2007, 8; Schubenz 2020, 13). German foresters were held in high esteem, which explains National Socialists’ efforts to win and “educate” the occupational group as party-loyal role models in rural areas (Imort 2005, 54). The positive standing of the forester is still clearly evident in the Heimatfilms of the 50s (Der Förster vom Silberwald, 1954, Die Försterliesel, 1956, etc.). 

Forest management was accelerated by wood’s function as an essential means of sustenance in pre-industrial life and lumber’s later central commercial role. This also positioned forests at the center of struggles between landowners and the remaining population. Questions of wood ownership and theft constitute an important narrative thread in Droste-Hülshoff’s crime novella Die Judenbuche (1842); Karl Marx addresses the legal framework around wood ownership and user rights in “Debatten uber das Holzgesetz” (1842) published in the Rheinische Zeitung in the same year. The fact that industrialization and the concomitant deforestation took a toll on the environment is also frequently linked to the pronounced sentimentality vis-a-vis the forest in the texts by authors of the Romantic period, such as Mörike, Storm, Tieck, Eichendorff, and, later, Stifter (Schubenz, 2020, 20-21, 31-32). 

Individual scholars have undertaken efforts to trace the export of German forest science and management practices, specifically to the US and into Germany’s and Britain's colonies (Poling 2020; Schmidt 2009; Sunseri 2003; Brown 2003). Especially in the context of the latter, forest management has been discussed as a means of political control and oppression. In 21st-century Germany, the conflicts around the forest which gain most public attention are playing out between activists with urgent environmental concerns and land-holding companies acting in accordance with their economic motives. The most prominently discussed site of such struggle in recent decades was the Hambach Forest. The land of the Hambach Forest was acquired by RWE AG, one of Germany’s largest energy corporations, about five decades ago with the intention to turn it into an open-pit coal mine. Between 2012 and 2020, activists staged several extended tree-sits to protect the trees from logging. 

The historically grown cultural-economic-environmental complexity of the forest continues to evolve and yield critical and engaging scholarship. As in scholarship on anglophone literature, there are efforts within German Studies to critically expand the field by linking Germany’s and German forests’ specific history to questions of belonging in terms of race and sexual/gender identity (Stehle 2023). On the economic and ecological side, a wide area of investigation is currently opening up as land grabbing, a fight around renewables and CO2-certificates, and ecosystem failures require urgent attention. For the English-speaking context, an interesting link between literary and economic paradigms was recently proposed by Rob Nixon (2021) who suggests that narratives of entanglement may be received as structural alternatives to neoliberal logics. The many recent and comprehensive volumes on the history of the forest in German Studies (Schubenz 2020, Zechner 2016, Högl 2021) are an indication that this field will further expand and grow in critical directions in the upcoming years.

Reference Works

  • Högl, Georg. 2021. Wald – Weber – Wagner: Studien zur Waldthematik in der musikalischen Öffentlichkeit des 19. Jahrunderts. Königshausen u. Neumann.
  • Schama, Simon. 1996. Landscape and Memory. Fontana Press.
  • Schubenz, Klara. 2020. Der Wald in der Literatur des 19. Jahrhunderts: Geschichte einer romantisch-realistischen Ressource. Konstanz University Press.
  • Uekötter, Frank. 2007. Umweltgeschichte im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert. Oldenbourg.
  • Wilson, Jeffrey K. 2012. The German Forest: Nature, Identity, and the Contestation of a National Symbol, 1871-1914. University of Toronto Press.
  • Zechner, Johannes. 2016. Der deutsche Wald : eine Ideengeschichte zwischen Poesie und Ideologie 1800-1945. Philipp von Zabern.

Works Cited

  • Brown, Karen. 2003. “‘Trees, forests and communities’: some historiographical approaches to environmental history on Africa.” Area 35 (4): 343–56.
  • DeMarco, Richard and Joseph Beuys. 1982. “Conversations with artists.” Studio International 195: 46-47.
  • Nixon, Rob. 2021. “The Less Selfish Gene: Forest Altruism, Neoliberalism, and the Tree of Life.” Environmental Humanities 13 (2). https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-9320189
  • Imort, Michael. 2005. "’Eternal forest-eternal Volk’" the rhetoric and reality of national socialist forest policy.” In How Green Were the Nazis? Nature, Environment, and Nation in the Third Reich, edited by Franz-Josef Brüggemeier, Mark Cioc and Thomas Zeller. Ohio University Press. EBSCOhost
  • “Fakten statt Märchen,” Open Pedition, accessed August 2025, https://www.openpetition.de/petition/online/even-in-the-forest-its-facts-we-want-instead-of-fairy-tales#petition-main
  • Poling, Kristin. 2020. “A Walhalla in the Wasteland: Carl Ernest Schmidt and the Quest of One German American Businessman to Save Michigan’s Forests” The Michigan Historical Review 46 (2): 1-30.
  • Schama, Simon. 1996. Landscape and Memory. Fontana Press.
  • Schmidt, Uwe E. 2009. “German Impact and Influences on American Forestry until
  • World War II.” Journal of Forestry 107 (3): 139-45.
  • Schubenz, Klara. 2020. Der Wald in der Literatur des 19. Jahrhunderts: Geschichte einer romantisch-realistischen Ressource. Konstanz University Press.
  • Uekötter, Frank. 2007. Umweltgeschichte im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert. Oldenbourg.
  • Stehle, Maria. 2023. Plants, Places, and Power: Towards Social and Ecological Justice in German Literature and Film. Camden House.
  • Sunseri, Thaddeus. 2003. “Reinterpreting a Colonial Rebellion: Forestry and Social Control in German East Africa, 1874-1915.” Environmental History 8: 430-51.