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You are here: Home Life in News Focus Germany’s beloved forests threatened by environmental...

26/06/2009Germany’s beloved forests threatened by environmental destruction

While Germany has historically revered its forested landscapes, decades of maltreatment have begun to take their toll.

Germans have always had a fascination and love for forests and trees.

In the works of such writers as Rainer Maria Rilke, trees stand undaunted in the mysterious German forest, permanently providing shelter and succour, wilderness and nature.

Virtually every German town has woods on its outskirts, originally planted to provide timber for construction.

As one forester put it: "The woods are not some remote ideal to be approached in literature or hiking boots but an intimate part of even the most urbanized life."

"Forest fascination" is associated with the nation's treasury of sagas and fairy tales, where robbers hide out in the woods; bad wolves devour grandmothers and little girls in red-riding hoods; and children lose their way in the woods and stumble into the hands of evil witches.

Mythical glorification of the ranks of trees first reached its zenith in the songs, prose and paintings of the Romantic period. The Nazis were likewise obsessed with the forest.

In 1935, Hitler's deputy Hermann Göring, from his forest hunting retreat, said: "We have become used to seeing the German nation as eternal. There is no better symbol for us than the forest, which was and always will be eternal. The eternal forest and an eternal nation – they belong together."

Black Forest: autumnal scenary
Black Forest: autumnal scenary - Photo tillwe

An escape, wasting away

In a decimated Germany after World War II, Germans still kept heading to their beloved forests.

"It was there," said Berlin journalist Klaus Hartung, "that the German soul was able to exhale everything that it had inhaled during the history of Germany."

By the late 1970s, the decline of the forests had become apparent. In the 1980s in Bavaria alone, 2.5 million hectares of woodland were visibly damaged by pollution.

Vast numbers of trees in the fabled Black Forest of Baden-Württemberg were under threat. The German word to describe this phenomenon is Waldsterben, “forest death.”

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