Bernd-Stefan Grewe. Der versperrte Wald: Resourcenmangel in der bayerischen Pfalz (1814-1870). Cologne: BÖ¶hlau, 2004. 508 pp. EUR 52.90 (cloth), ISBN 978-3-412-10904-2.

Reviewed by Jeffrey K. Wilson (Department of History, University of New Orleans)
Published on H-German (April, 2006)

Not Seeing the Forest for the Trees: How the Bavarian State Created a Wood Crisis

Bernd-Stefan Grewe's Der versperrte Wald is a significant contribution to the debate over the early modern wood crisis (Holznotdebatte). Since the 1980s--in the wake of the energy crisis and amidst worries about the fate of Germany's forests--German scholars have argued about the nature and limits of the wood supply in previous centuries. Widespread reports of wood shortages, along with moves by cameralist rulers to regulate the timber market, have led several scholars to conclude that a serious environmental and economic catastrophe loomed by the end of the eighteenth century. After all, wood served as the primary fuel and a critical material for construction and everyday objects. Disaster was averted in the nineteenth century, such scholars argue, through the efforts of German foresters to maximize timber production and afforest large tracts of land, as well as through the substitution of iron and coal for wood throughout the economy.

Grewe places himself in the revisionist camp, challenging the notion that the German states ever faced a real lack of timber. Joachim Radkau pioneered the revisionist thesis in 1983, arguing that discursive sources complaining of a wood crisis were not reliable. With the major sources of timber in the hands of various German princes, wood was a highly politicized resource, and grumbling about its supply often stood in for other grievances.[1] And as Ingrid Schäfer has demonstrated, governments manipulated the timber markets to their own advantage, as in Lippe, where officials provided the state-run brickworks with copious amounts of wood while limiting the supply to private glassworks, thereby driving up the price. Both Radkau and Schäfer have argued that since new technologies did not spare timber as either fuel or material, this suggests further that there was no real wood crisis.[2] Critics of the revisionists, such as Christoph Ernst, have pointed to foresters' measurements and statistics of timber productivity, which indicate a dwindling supply of wood and an impending economic disaster.[3] Grewe seeks therefore to explore not the discourses surrounding the timber markets, but the material condition of the forests and their users. Indeed, he protests that the increasing interest in cultural history of recent years has led to a neglect of the material world (noting that he himself at one point contemplated a study of superstition).

Grewe expands on the Holznotdebatte in two ways. First, he broadens the discussion from the exclusive focus on wood to include a more extensive array of forest resources important to peasant communities (including pasturage and "green fertilizer" such as bark and leaves). Second, Grewe shifts the spotlight of his investigation away from the period of heightened discourses of crisis at the end of the eighteenth century to the quieter nineteenth. By so doing, he explores the problem of wood shortages in the period when they were supposedly being solved through the introduction of more effective regulation, reforestation and resource substitution. These two moves allow him to bolster the revisionist argument in new ways.

With this emphasis on materialism, Grewe seeks to answer two questions. First, to what extent was there a real economic and environmental crisis, and second, to what extent was this crisis reflected in population growth? Grewe regards the Bavarian Pfalz as an excellent venue to investigate these questions. The Pfalz was a heavily populated region, in which during the nineteenth century (if not before), the population reached the limits of growth, generating many thousands of emigrants. It was also a hilly terrain of low forest productivity, from which timber could be easily transported downstream to major markets along the Rhine, but into which it was difficult to efficiently import wood or other forest products. These factors made the Pfalz a region with a dense population impinging heavily on the local environment. If any part of the German lands had suffered from a crisis of forest resources, it would have been the Pfalz.

To assess the dimensions of the supply and demand for forest resources, Grewe addresses five issues in the chapters that make up the body of the work. In chapter 2, he measures the Bavarian state's control over the forests of its recently acquired territory of the Pfalz. The Pfalz, with its legacy of Napoleonic central administration (kept in place by the Bavarians), saw even more direct state intervention in the local economy than the historic lands of the Bavarian crown. Government foresters had wide-ranging powers not only over the 49 percent of local forests directly owned by the state, but also over further 38 percent of woodlands owned by municipalities and other institutions. Only 13 percent of the region's forests remained in private hands, and even these were theoretically subject to state oversight. Grewe concludes that despite local resistance to forestry policy--perhaps most dramatically evident in the wholesale seizure of forests by the peasantry in the revolutionary moments of 1832 and 1848-9--the state exercised enormous influence over the supply of timber to local markets.

The strong state control of sylvan resources led to increasing tensions with the rural populace. In chapter 3, Grewe documents the desperate need for wood and other forest resources on the part of the peasantry. In an effort to maximize wood production, foresters ended traditional practices such as grazing animals in the forest or the collection of dead leaves for fertilizer, as both degraded soil quality and hampered tree growth. An ongoing struggle between the Pfälzer and the state over the woods led to an extraordinarily high level of prosecutions for forest theft; foresters arrested at least 20 percent of the population of Pfalz over the course of the 1830s and 1840s. A black market in these resources emerged; this trade was sometimes protected by local mayors and other petty officials. Certainly, many Pfälzer suffered from a lack of access to forest products.

Grewe points out in chapter 4, however, that the widespread dearth of timber did not necessarily mean forests were on the verge of extinction in the Pfalz. Indeed, wood became scarce not from of a lack of trees, but rather because the state held those trees off the market. Whereas in the late eighteenth century trees were cut generally between 70 and 90 years of age, by the early nineteenth century this had been raised to 120 years, and in the 1840s to 144 years. For the foresters, the sylvan ideal was the Hochwald, a forest divided into 144 equally-sized plots planted at one-year intervals--this organization would ideally assure a constant flow of suitably large trees. For the state, this ideal meant larger trees and more usable lumber per unit of land. But for the general public, it meant a sudden withdrawal of significant amounts of timber from the market. These forestry practices thus limited the amount of wood immediately available to the market.

Grewe argues in chapter 5 that the development of new roads and railways made the exploitation of previously isolated forests more economical, expanding the availability of timber. Forestry statistics had long discounted such woodlands, but every year wood production exceeded estimates. And there was no question about the sustainability of these forestry practices; foresters continuously harvested less timber than they cultivated. Enormous reserves of wood were accumulating in the state forests at the expense of consumers. Foresters prioritized the development of timber resources for the future over current demand, leading to shortages.

In chapter 6, Grewe considers the state's near-monopoly on the timber market. This economic dominance ensured that prices bore only a limited relationship to supply and demand. The artificial timber scarcity caused by efforts to grow ever older and larger trees in the state forests pushed prices ever higher. These rising prices increasingly commercialized the market for wood and other forest products. Although peasants had once had access to both state and communal forests to collect firewood and graze their animals, they were increasingly forced to buy wood and hay or their substitutes to meet their needs. Naturally, the poorest members of the community were hardest hit by these changes. As a result, state officials were forced to give away firewood at low or no cost to the rural populace, for fear of widespread theft. Ultimately, Grewe argues, the resource crisis in the Pfalz was not a product of overpopulation, but rather one of state limits on access to resources.

While Grewe's argument is compelling, one wonders if his work might not have been enriched by a greater engagement with cultural history. Indeed, despite his protests, it seems cultural factors do play a critical role in his story. Grewe's hard-headed foresters, while supposedly operating in the rational interests of the state, pursued the ideal of the Hochwald even as it meant accumulating unnecessary timber reserves and harmed the local economy. Their obsession with the Hochwald even led them, as Grewe suggests, to underestimate the health and productivity of the forests under their care. Such irrational behavior seems to require an explanation beyond a state monopoly on the means of sylvan reproduction. Moreover, an engagement with James Scott's Seeing Like a State would have linked this specific instance of a state's inability to perceive the effect of its actions on the public with wider debates about the impact of "high modernism."[4] Despite these criticisms, Grewe does an admirable job of demonstrating that the wood crisis was really in the eye of the beholder.

Notes

[1]. Joachim Radkau, "Holzverknappung und Krisenbewußtsein im 18. Jahrhundert," Geschichte und Gesellschaft 9 (1983), pp. 513-543; Joachim Radkau, "Zur angeblichen Energiekriese des 18. Jahrhunderts: Revisionistische Bemerkungen über die 'Holznot'," Vierteljahrschrift für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte 73 (1986), pp. 1-37.

[2]. Joachim Radkau and Ingrid Schäfer, Holz. Ein Naturstoff in der Technikgeschichte (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1987).

[3]. Christoph Ernst, _Den Wald entwickeln. Ein Politik- und Konfliktfeld in Hunsrück und Eifel im 18. Jahrhundert (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2000).

[4]. James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).

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Citation: Jeffrey K. Wilson. Review of Grewe, Bernd-Stefan, Der versperrte Wald: Resourcenmangel in der bayerischen Pfalz (1814-1870). H-German, H-Net Reviews. April, 2006.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=11672

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