Uwe E. Schmidt. Der Wald in Deutschland im 18 und 19 Jahrhundert: Das Problem der Ressourcenknappheit dargestellt am Beispiel der Waldressourcenknappheit in Deutschland im 18 und 19 Jahrhundert--eine historisch-politische Analyse. cken: Conte Verlag, 2002. Illustrations + maps + notes + bibliography. EUR 34.50 (cloth), ISBN 978-3-9808118-6-6.
Reviewed by William Rollins (Programme in German, University of Canterbury)
Published on H-German (April, 2006)
Wood Shortages: A Crisis in Fact
In most parts of eighteenth-century Germany, wood was as central to the economy as petroleum is to the world of today: not only did wood fire all of the major industrial processes for making glass, steel, ceramics and salt, it warmed the households of princes and peasants, formed the structures in which they lived and worked and represented a highly sought-after international commodity. Forests were also a key part of the traditional agricultural economy, providing forage and winter feed for countless thousands of pigs and cows. Uwe Schmidt's massively detailed study drives home the point that everyone wanted a piece of the forest-- with the result that the resource became stretched, conflicts among users sharpened, political power was challenged, and technological and silvicultural innovation occurred. Some clear winners and losers emerged from the wood crisis, and the manner of its resolution arguably set the tone for a unique convergence of authoritarian, technocratic and capitalist tendencies that would dominate a modernizing Germany in the nineteenth century.
For a very long time the significance of the struggle for wood supply went unrecognized by the larger guild of academics. Much early work stood firmly in the tradition of Forstgeschichte, a review of events from the internal perspective of the discipline of forestry. The main narrative was one that recounted silvicultural advances and celebrated the "modernized" state administrative structures that were their vehicle. It remained for more recent historians to ask searching questions drawn from the intersecting fields of social, economic and environmental history: for whom was modernized timber production good, and at what cost? Taking this critical impetus to a striking extreme, one influential group of scholars--Joachim Radkau is a prominent representative--has come to the conclusion that, despite some wood shortages in the eighteenth century, no crisis in an objective sense occurred. Absolutist rulers instead used the diffuse evidence of shortfalls to manufacture an acute public perception of crisis, and they then cleverly exploited this perception in order to install a new "economized" regime of land rights along with a layer of heavy-handed police, the ubiquitous foresters.
Schmidt provides a definitive corrective to this view with a painstaking analysis that circles ever upward from a dense blanket of original sources that cover the Saar, Hunsrück, Pfalz and Eifel regions on the left bank of the Rhine. Casual readers might be forgiven for missing his key findings: the book is laid out with old-school patience, and it is only after 260 single-spaced pages that Schmidt marshals his evidence and suddenly turns it against the prevailing wisdom described above. Schmidt argues persuasively for the existence of a real problem with wood supply in most of the regions he studied. It was far from being a "staged crisis" engineered by power-hungry rulers: based on his sources and an analysis of a large body of other scholars' work, Schmidt portrays rulers who made desperate, costly and unpopular decisions as they tried to deal with a serious faktische Krise over large parts of Germany in the last decades of the eighteenth century, or at least one that can be characterized as a well-founded prognostizierte Krise.
Schmidt bases his findings on an impressive range of evidence. Sources reflect the perceptions of all three major interested segments of society: large commercial and industrial users, peasants and traditional users (also citizens of the towns) and lastly the ruler and his forestry apparatus. The gamut of document types runs from administrative edicts, foresters' maps and personnel files to commercial contracts, autobiographies, popular ditties, Imperial and lower court records and not a few contemporary engravings. More than 3,000 footnotes attest to Schmidt's thoroughness in combing through archives both major (Landeshauptarchiv Koblenz) and minor (Standesamt Großblittersdorf).
A second important dimension to the argument runs through Schmidt's book. If the wood crisis was real, then German society faced a genuine environmental problem, and (as Schmidt's data on restored forests circa 1900 seem to prove) solved it. It achieved sustainability--but how, and at what cost? Schmidt is concerned to derive a generalized set of lessons from the changes that swept through the eighteenth-century forest, and thus he assembles and labels the techniques according to more abstract criteria. One strategy for dealing with wood shortages was substitution, for example: as did the English, once the wood ran out, Germans turned (or were virtually driven, by regulations) to coal--a fuel with its own limits, of course. More efficient industrial processes were an example of a strategy of saving; on the supply side, better silviculture increased the long-term availability of wood. Transport reduced local shortages, but merely shifted the basic problem geographically. Some measures had far-reaching social implications, as Schmidt points out: a strategy of legal redefinition inherently reduced the access of certain groups to the resource, essentially criminalizing them. This technique shaded over into a "demoscopic strategy" that shifted entire populations away from the threatened resource.
Through his fine-grained research Schmidt is able to adduce evidence aplenty for all of these strategies. Commercial and technological transformations are described in detail, but social historians will be interested in the many fascinating sidelights cast on everyday life in the grip of a fuel and material shortage. In the winter of 1785 Catholic children in Rheinhessen began attending Protestant schools because these did not require contributions toward wood heating costs; elsewhere schools did not open for months in some winters, and children remained at home in bed for entire cold winter days (pp. 73, 281, 243). All over Germany local wood shortages led to riots and looting of woodlots. Drastic new measures that outlawed traditional gathering and grazing rights resulted in thousands of fines and criminal convictions: the high point was perhaps reached in the Palatinate in 1830, a year in which one out of every five citizens was convicted of a forest offence (pp. 223, 165). Harsh penalties, the overbearing behavior of foresters, and the scarcity of wood needed for daily life were in fact key factors that pushed rural Germans to migrate to the New World (pp. 223, 289, 316f). The scarcity of timber for building also left an indelible mark on the townscape: Schmidt reminds us of decrees in many different locations that specified stone construction for the walls of houses (pp. 54, 155, 195). These regulations may have been inspired by temporary shortages, but they soon took root in construction dogma. It is interesting to speculate that, in this way, the wood crisis may have profoundly influenced the environmental psychology of Germans for many years after it ceased to exist in reality. The same long-lasting effects can be observed in the countryside more generally: a lack of wood kicked off a radical process that Schmidt calls a "socio-economization"--the imposition of a new economic order that entailed a one-sided social hierarchy in which nobles and large commercial interests were placed firmly before the rural underclass (p. 348).
Schmidt's findings on the causes, extent, and significance of Germany's wood crisis are extremely solid. It seems likely, therefore, that the book under discussion will be an essential starting point for any future scholarship in the area. For its lateral observations and breadth of references, Schmidt's book can be recommended to anyone with an interest in German society of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
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Citation:
William Rollins. Review of Schmidt, Uwe E., Der Wald in Deutschland im 18 und 19 Jahrhundert: Das Problem der Ressourcenknappheit dargestellt am Beispiel der Waldressourcenknappheit in Deutschland im 18 und 19 Jahrhundert--eine historisch-politische Analyse.
H-German, H-Net Reviews.
April, 2006.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=11671
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