The Conquest Of Nature: Water, Landscape, and the Making of Modern Germany - Hardcover

Blackbourn, David

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0224060716 ISBN 13: 9780224060714

Verlag: Jonathan Cape, 2006

Inhaltsangabe

History takes place in space as well as time.This brilliant new book tells the story of how the German landscape was dramatically reshaped in the two hundred years from Frederick the Great to Adolf Hitler. (2005-02-17)

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

David Blackbourn has been Professor of History and Head of the Centre for European Studies at Harvard University since 1994.He is the author of The Fontana History of Germany in the 19th Century and Marpingen. (2004-11-30)

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This brilliant new book explores how, over the last 250 years, the German people have shaped their natural environment and how the landscapes they created took a powerful hold on the German imagination. It investiagtes how the most fundamental element - water - was 'conquered' by draining fens and marshes, straightening the courses of rivers, building high dams and exploiting hydro-electric power.

The book begins in the 1740s with Frederick the Great of Prussia, who regarded the reclamation of marshland as 'conquests for barbarism'. We meet Johann Gottfried Tulla, 'the man who tamed the wild Rhine' in the nineteenth century. We learn about the construction of the Prussian port of Wilhelmshaven on the Jade Bay, later to become a symbol of the new Germany's naval ambitions. We witness the colonisation of the moors and the triumph of the steamship. We encounter of Otto Intze, 'master dam-builder' of the years around 1900, whose modern marvels supplied drinking water to a fast-growing population and provided hydro-electric power - 'white coal'.

But the dark side of this conquest emerged under the Nazis, who set out to colonise 'living space' in the East. Convinced of their superiority over the 'marsh-dwelling Slavs', the Nazi occupiers of Poland embarked on a programme of population transfer and racial engineering. This physical and ethnic re-shaping of the east European landscape would result in the muder of million of Jews and Poles. Race and reclamation went hand in hand.

The modern idea of 'mastery' over nature always had its critics, whether their motives were aesthetic, religious or environmentalist. Germany's defeat in 1945 brought renewed attachment to an idealised natural landscape. This persisted as a conservative reproach through the ensuing 'economic miracle', which caused major problems of pollution and environmental destruction. It was in the 1970s, however that protecting the environment became a central part of the West German political agenda and soon began to show results. The collapse of the Wall in 1989 then revealed the catastrophic state of the environment in East Germany, a country that had been in thrall to Soviet-style industrialisation.

The Conquest of Nature is a groundbreaking study that opens new vistas on the history of Germany. It also shows that while mastery over nature delivers undoubted benefits, it can only come at a tremendous cost to both the natural environment and human life.

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Jonathan Cape
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0224060716
• ISBN 13: 9780224060714
• Einband: Tapa dura
• Sprache: Englisch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 512
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar