The Old Conservation History - and the New: An Argument for Fresh Perspectives on an Established Topic

Abstract

The German conservation movement is a classic topic of environmental historiography, and yet interpreta tions have often been characterized by a constrained focus. In a critical discussion of the literature, this article seeks to identify new venues for research. After outlining the breadth of conservation-related developments in late 19th century Germany, it identifies four directions for future studies: collective biographies of the conservation move ment's personnel; friends and allies of the conservation movement and the way conservationists defined their rela tions towards them; the environmental opposition; and the relationship between the environmental movement and na ture as an actor. Taken together, the article argues for a less partisan history of the conservation movement, assuming that such an approach will ultimately serve better the inter ests of both the environmental history community and the conservation movement. When Hans-Ulrich Wehler wrote his seminal monograph on Imperial Germany in the early 1970s, he started by asserting that It is no longer possible now adays to write a history of the Emperor's Reich of 1871 in the traditional style of political history.1 Like historians of Imperial Germany in the 1960s, histori ans of nature protection are increasingly realizing nowadays that they are