How can a wounded land become a source of healing, rejuvenation and renewal?  How can a former death strip become a lifeline connecting a painful past to the promise of the future?  Bates College Environmental Studies Professor Sonja Pieck explains how this is precisely what is happening with Germany’s Green Belt.  The Green Belt is Germany’s largest conservation zone, stretching almost 900 miles from the Czech Republic in the South to the Baltic Sea in the North.  Winding along the former border between East and West Germany, the Green Belt is at once a memorial space devoted to Germany‘s Cold War and even more distant past and a protected habitat built to safeguard Germany’s biodiversity for the future.  How did the Green Belt come into being and how has memory become one of its core features?  Understanding the unique relationship between memory and conservation is the focus of Sonja Pieck’s recent book, Mnemonic Ecologies: Memory and Nature Conservation Along the Former Iron Curtain.  

Thirty five years after the fall of the Berlin Wall it is easy to forget how the Cold War border between East and West Germany was once one of the world’s most militarized spaces.  Beginning in the early 1950s, the East German government relocated thousands of people who lived in the border zone.  In some cases farmers took their livestock and equipment and were able to flee to West Germany.  In other cases, paramilitary units arrived without warning and forced residents from their homes at gunpoint. In the end some 300 villages were razed to give way to an elaborate security system designed to prevent the citizens of the newly created Democratic Republic of East Germany from escaping to the West.  Over time this system grew to include patrol roads, watchtowers, guard dogs, spring guns, steel reinforced fences with trip wires, flood lights, anti vehicular ditches and more.  By the 1970s a 500 meter strip was added together with minefields making it easier to shoot or explode potential transgressors.  Hundreds died attempting to cross the border.  The exact number is still unknown.  

In the late 1970s a young conservationist and avid birdwatcher by the name of Kai Froebel made a surprising observation. Kai grew up in the village of Hassenberg in Bavaria and could practically see the border from his home.  During his high school years he noticed a concentration of winchats, a rare songbird, flourishing along the border.  Much to his surprise, Kai realized that the death strip had become an ecological lifeline for a species that was vanishing elsewhere in Germany.  After finishing his university studies he took a job with the BUND, one of Germany’s largest environmental groups, where he now heads the Nuremberg office.   At the Bund Kai began to explore the possibility, should Germany ever reunify, of transforming the border into an ecological corridor that would both safeguard nature and deepen unification.  Together with scientist and documentary filmmaker Heinz Sielmann, they became the leading advocates of the Green Belt.

Following the unexpected fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany, the BUND took on the work of acquiring the land that would become the Green Belt.  This was no easy task and one which continues to the present day.  In some cases former border lands were claimed by families who argued that the East German state had stolen it from them.  In other cases corporations took advantage of the opportunity for a land grab.  Some German Federal States retained control of large tracts of land.  Ironically, in contrast with its deplorable environmental record, the Democratic Republic of East Germany, was instrumental to the future creation of the Green Belt.  In its final months the GDR set aside some 4.5% of its land for conservation purposes.  The collaboration of the Federal State of Thuringia, once part of East Germany and the state with the largest share of land along the former border, provided much of the initial momentum for the Green Belt.  Celebrity advocates, like former Soviet leader Michael Gorbachev, also helped promote awareness and support for the Green Belt.  

Acquiring land for the Green Belt, German environmentalists encountered unexpected suspicion, distrust and even resentment among former East Germans.  In part this had to do with the history and development of the field of environmental science in Germany. Influenced by path breaking books like Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) on the dangers of pesticides like DDT, the field of environmental science that took shape in the 1960s and 1970s used science against science.  Through scientific methods, environmental scientists shed light on how modern industrial societies were damaging the planet and sickening its inhabitants.  Data driven, empirically based scientific methods to safeguard the planet, however, didn’t always resonate with real people.  Former residents of East Germany, for example, might be far more interested in reclaiming land stolen by the German Democratic Republic than fighting to protect vanishing species. Having experienced the expropriation of their land by the “reds” many former East Germans regarded the “greens” as the newest threat.   

Environmentalists needed to find an approach to the land that would resonate with local residents. This was problematic because of the history of conservation in Germany.  Conservation had its roots in the nineteenth century reaction to industrialization and urbanization in Germany that was paving over older German landscapes and ways of life.  It was anchored in the term “Heimat,” loosely translated as homeland, which connotes a deep emotional attachment to one’s place of origin and a desire to protect it for future generations.  The concept of Heimat, however, was hijacked by the National Socialists who warped it into the rhetoric of blood and soil and the need to find lebensraum or living space for Germans in the East.  The development of the modern field of environmental science was an intentional move away from a discredited history of conservation and the historically loaded concept of Heimat. 

The borderlands are wounded terrain, etched with grief, anger, and despair. A strange irony of history produced a mnemonic ecological condition: a damned place that has become a thing of beauty and refuge. These dense layers of past and present must be treated with care, and conservationists must tend to local people, local knowledges, and local natures to understand how the borderlands have been both made and experienced. Sonja Pieck, Mnemonic Ecologies: Memory and Nature Conservation Along the Former Iron Curtain

Sonja Pieck uses the term mnemonic memories to capture the multifaceted ways that memory works in conjunction with the environment.  Landscapes are layered with different types of memory.  They might recall a traumatic past of loss or dislocation.  They could evoke nostalgia for the places we experienced at different stages in our lives.  From past land to water usage, the environments we inherit carry the imprint of histories of human intervention—even centuries later.  Memory can also be found in flora and fauna.  If left alone, environments altered by human intervention can revert to previously existing states or conditions.  Deer in Europe have a demonstrated ability to recall the past.  Decades after the end of the Cold War migration patterns of deer remain permanently altered by memories of trauma caused by now vanished militarized zones.  For conservation work to be meaningful and lasting, Sonya calls for a mnemonic approach that integrates the connections between memory and nature.  

After the initial unexpected backlash, the Green Belt now exemplifies many aspects of an mnemonic approach to conservation.  To promote tourism, “Nature, Culture, and History” are packaged together as the unique experience offered by the Green Belt.  Maps for hiking and bicycle trails include information about local historical sites and monuments as well as natural features and particular indigenous species.  Efforts have been made to educate visitors about how the former military infrastructure of the borderlands shaped the lives of local inhabitants.  Working with GDR victims associations, the BUND has built several memorials to those killed crossing the border.  Signage features tragic stories the BUND has chosen to spotlight.  Youth camps that once focused exclusively on caring for nature now include history lessons about the border and Germany’s partition.  The BUND is now using the Green Belt to actively curate the past for younger generations with no living memory of the Cold War.  

One of the BUND’s more successful projects to weave together nature and memory while promoting greater awareness of the Green Belt centered on Mario Goldstein.  A familiar nature and travel documentary personality, Mario Goldstein is also a former East German twice imprisoned by the Stasi (East German Police) for his attempts to escape to the West.  By writing a book about his travels along the border, supported by the BUND, Goldstein provided a mixture of observations about the flora and fauna of the border as well as history of its Cold War past based on encounters with people he met along the way.  Goldstein’s portraits also feature stories about those who died in their attempt to make it to the West.  After publishing his book, Goldstein returned to the border for a speaking tour.  Much to his surprise he ended up moderating many deeply emotional conversations with audience members from the former East Germany eager for an opportunity to communicate difficult memories about this past.  For both Goldstein and his audience the Green Belt made possible painful but deeply therapeutic conversations about a still unresolved past.  

In some cases the most powerful way to evoke memories of the past in conjunction with nature is to do nothing at all.  This is the case with the village of Jahrsau in Saxony-Anhalt.  Jahrsau was a community with roots stretching back over five hundred years into the German past.  However, following the partition of Germany it found itself on the wrong side of history and became one of the hundreds of communities leveled to make way for the militarized border between the Cold War Germanies.  The skeletal remains of Jahrsau, however, are still visible.  Rather than curating the site, restoring or preserving the ruins, nature has been allowed to run its course.   But it’s precisely the fact that nature is slowly absorbing and reclaiming the land that gives Jahrsau a haunting power to evoke both the destruction and memories of the people who once lived there.

Mnemonic ecologies, Sonja Pieck reminds us, are not limited to recalling human traces of the past.  Plants, animals, and even entire ecosystems can evoke lost times and places.  Conservation work along stretches of the Green Belt that overlap with the Elbe River is one example of this.  In contrast with the Rhine, Germany’s largest river, the Elbe flows primarily through East Germany.  With its far greater wealth, West Germany reengineered the Rhine in ways that erased most traces of its past.  In the poorer East Germany, the Elbe was largely spared.  Through Green Belt conservation work resources have been devoted to removing the often centuries old dikes, jetties and other forms of construction that impede the natural flow of the river.  The objective of this work is to recreate the alluvial plains that once existed along the Elbe.  Guided by maps and vision of a pre-industrial German landscape from the early nineteenth century, the aim is to reengineer a lost German past along the Elbe.   From the planting of hardwood trees to recreate alluvial forests to the introduction of particular breeds of cattle and horses similar to species that once existed in the region, the Green Belt is engaged in a Jurassic-style recreation of an imagined environmental past.  

While celebrating the mnemonic inspired work of the Green Belt, Sonja Pieck warns us of the dangers of memory charged conservation.  Effort to recreate pristine German landscapes always risks veering in the direction of a narrowly defined, culturally exclusive German past.  Reviving terms like Heimat to tap into the power of nostalgia to safeguard endangered environments can also amplify racist and xenophboic sentiments. For the Green Belt to resonate with Germany’s new multicultural democratic reality it needs to be more than just a refuge for all things German.  At a time when threats to biodiversity endanger the planet, the Green Belt must be a beacon for the preservation, restoration, and regeneration of complex ecosystems that benefit everyone.*

*I would like to thank Thomas Stephan for sharing his exceptional borderpost/winchat photo with me which I have used as the landing photo for this episode.  ©/Thomas Stephan/mail@thomas-stephan.com