Natur, Raume, Landschaften

Abstract

Krause, Burkhardt, and Ulrich Scheck, eds. Natur, Raume, Landschaften. 2. Internationales Kingstoner Symposium. Munich: Iudicium, 1996. 288 pp. DM 56.00 paperback. Schulz, Karla L., and Kenneth S. Calhoon, eds. The Idea of the Forest: German and American Perspectives on the Culture and Politics of Trees. German Life and Civilization, 14. New York: Lang, 1996. 221 pp. $49.95 hardcover. Any attempt to come to terms with such broad concepts as space, nature, landscape would appear to require a diverse set of tools and texts. The two volumes reviewed here represent attempts to provide a multi-dimensional, multi-cultural perspective on these themes without reducing them to simplistic definitions. Both volumes are collections of essays from conferences held in the early 1990s and thus, to some extent, resonate with the ecological debates of the period-in both Europe and North America. The essays in Natur, Raume, Landschaften, which gathers papers from the 1993 International Symposium at Kingston, Ontario, cover a immense amount of ground as the topic of the symposium suggests: Raumbilder and Raumvorstellungen im interkulturellen Vergleich/ Nature, Spaces, Landscapes: Images and Concepts of Space in Intercultural Perspective. Of the nineteen articles, five are in English, fourteen in German, thus illustrating, on a purely linguistic level, the attempt to bring scholars from diverse spaces into the discussion. In contrast to many volumes that seek to understand the conceptions of space, territory, nature, and landscape in an intercultural or cross-cultural perspective, this volume does not focus on discourses such as travel, primitivism, tourism or imperialism. The first handful of essays turns attention to more philosophical understandings of space, perception, and aesthetic appreciation. Burkhardt Krause's article, which investigates the philological and historical development of the terms Landscaft, Landschaft, and Landscape as culturally constructed, illustrates the intercultural aspect of many of the essays, which seek to uncover the meanings of the three major terms through comparative studies in disciplines as diverse as literary studies (Anke Uebel) and ecology/forestry (Thomas Keller). The concept of natural spaces spills over into the conceptualization of urban spaces in the second part of the volume. Es gibt keine Raumgeschichte ohne Mediengeschichte, (273) declares Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, and certainly one of the dominant and most interesting topics covered in the volume is the interplay between media and the space (Jochen Horisch, Andreas Bohn). …