Cape £30 pp512
How many people who enjoy watching The Dambusters have ever paused to think about the dams breached in the film, the Möhne and the Eder — who built them, why they were there, who was drowned and what happened afterwards?
The answers are to be found in David Blackbourn’s startlingly original chronicle of Germany’s 250-year war against the elements. This is history at its most synoptic, weaving together disparate themes in a counterpoint of science and aesthetics, race and reclamation, hydrology and mythology.
Blackbourn transforms familiar landscapes into unfamiliar ones. He takes one back to a time when Rhinegold was not the name of an opera by Wagner, but a cottage industry in the wetlands that stretched on either side of this most romantic of rivers. The taming of the Rhine by the engineer Johann Gottfried Tulla gives Blackbourn one of his best chapters: a fairy tale of hubris and nemesis that might have come from the pens of Tulla’s Rhenish contemporaries, the brothers Grimm. This tale, however, is true. The rivers and coastline of Germany are as much the product of human endeavour as their depictions in art and literature.
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All attempts to tame the titanic forces of nature have ended by summoning up even greater catastrophes, from inundation to “desertification”. The unending struggle to force the water spirits to yield up their riches — land, energy, transport — is a Faustian pact with the devil. Indeed Goethe himself, at the end of Part Two of his Faust, depicts the brutal eviction and murder of an elderly couple to make way for Faust’s grandiose scheme of land reclamation.
Time and again, Blackbourn shows how the visionary plans of kings, bureaucrats and engineers have devastating practical consequences for lesser mortals. Frederick the Great spent almost as much effort and money on colonising the marshes of Prussia as he did on his wars. A century later, Frederick’s successors were no less determined to make the end justify the means, in this case the longed-for naval port of Wilhelmshaven on the North Sea. It took tens of thousands of men decades to build the new harbour, a beneficiary of Kaiser Wilhelm II’s delusions of world domination.
Back in the real world, the kaiser’s High Seas Fleet was the height of folly. After the first world war, which ended with a naval mutiny and German battleships scuttled at Scapa Flow, Wilhelmshaven lost its raison d’être. Its unemployed citizens voted Nazi in disproportionate numbers; rearmament brought temporary prosperity. Then the naval base was flattened by the RAF. It had lasted less than a century.
In Blackbourn’s hands, the story of the German dam builders is just as fascinating as that of the British dambusters. He identifies another heroic engineer, Otto Intze, as the man who single-handedly generated the German dam-building frenzy that lasted from the late 19th century to the 1960s.
Dam building was fuelled by the promise of “white coal” (hydro-electric power), reservoirs and flood-control, but its consequences were unpredictable and often counter- productive. Dams were a cultural no less than an economic phenomenon: their “sublime” architecture appealed to the same emotions as the giganticism that helped the likes of Albert Speer seduce the masses.
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But the full horror of the Nazi love affair with nature only becomes apparent in the land-reclamation projects of Germany’s “drive towards the East”. The German fantasy of grabbing Lebensraum (“living space”), treating the East as a kind of European Wild West, spawned grandiose resettlement schemes such as the Large-Scale Green Plan. The Nazis planned to reconfigure even wetlands such as the Pripet marshes as a “total spatial work of art”, peopled by ethnic Germans brought home to the Reich.
The dark side of such projects was the fate of their existing inhabitants. Jews were to be “driven into the marshes” — Hitler’s favourite euphemism for extermination. Blackbourn points out the irony that the intractability of the Pripet marshes turned them into one of the most important centres of partisan resistance in Europe.
The story does not end in 1945. Blackbourn is one of a generation of British historians, now in their fifties, who have helped revolutionise German historiography. (It was Blackbourn who opened up the history of German Catholicism, and whose History of Germany, 1780-1918 overturned numerous clichés.) Environmentalism has given him his new subject. Like the rest of his generation, he is sensitive to the ecological concerns that gave rise to the German Greens in the 1970s, the first of many such parties in Europe. He does not, however, disguise their dubious genealogy. Many conservationists, he explains, have been examples of the “avocado syndrome” — green outside, brown (ie Nazi) inside. Such paradoxes abound in this cornucopia of a book, which carefully unpicks the narratives of victors to reveal those of their victims. Thanks to Blackbourn, the history of the German landscape is no longer written in water.
Available at the Sunday Times Books First price of £27 on 0870 165 8585