Book Review: A greener vision of home: cultural politics and environmental reform in the German Heimatschutz movement, 1904-1918

Abstract

In A greener vision of home William Rollins provides a history of the German Heimatschutz movement, focusing on its linked environmental and cultural philosophies. Rollins offers a story of a predominantly middle-class movement responding to ‘the need for a culturally active brand of environmentalism, one that gave people something positive to aim for – a greener vision of home’ (p. viii) – and which in the process produced the term Heimat as a cultural force in its own right and a ‘paradigm of value’ (p. 5). The book appears in a series on ‘Social history, popular culture and politics in Germany’, but its implications as a telling study of ‘environmental culture’ (p. 6) go beyond German history. The book is divided into four substantive chapters, an introduction and conclusion. In the introduction Rollins highlights the complex relationship of modernity and nostalgia in such a movement, warning against the tendency to dismiss it as a simplistic reaction against the modern world. The first chapter provides a context for the movement, stressing German historical antecedents such as early nineteenth-century movements for land beautification, and parallels with movements in Britain. Chapter 2 focuses on the emergence of the Heimatschutz in Wilhelmine society, showing how it turned a term previously used in relation to military defence to environmental ends. Formally inaugurated in Dresden in March 1904 and initially focused in central Germany, by 1908 the movement had a strong influence on planning and architectural policies. A breakdown of the 30 000 membership in 1914 shows a predominance of civil servants, educationalists and businessmen. Rollins, employing a Gramscian analysis of hegemonic and counterhegemonic culture, terms this, slightly awkwardly, a counterculture within the bourgeoisie, negotiating rights of property and community and criticizing the acts of capitalist ‘native vandals’ (p. 148) through ‘Heimat economics’ (p. 144). In Chapter 3 Rollins covers specific strategies for ‘Envisioning the Heimat landscape’, highlighting a range of concerns which echo movements elsewhere; the erection of billboards in the landscape, field rationalization, forest monoculture. Debates over river-straightening could come straight from contemporary dis-