Nature in German Culture: The role of writers in environmental debate

“Educated people make nature their friend”, reads a large sign on the picturesque remains of the old town wall in Marbach.1 The cobbled streets and crooked, half-timbered houses of Schiller’s birthplace nestle on the slopes above the Romantic river Neckar, and although the panorama from the Schiller Museum and National Literary Archive is dominated to the South by a power station, and the wooded slopes downriver towards Ludwigsburg and its Baroque palace are dotted by pylons and criss-crossed by power cables, upstream the scene remains one of vineyards, orchards and open countryside. The whine of traffic along the river valley can be heard day and night in this populous area on the edge of the Stuttgart urban industrial region. Yet it still gives the appearance of being a place where people live in harmony with the natural surroundings. To the visitor, the inhabitants seem to lead comfortable, orderly lives, observing local customs, growing regional varieties of fruit, drinking the area’s distinctive wine made from the Trollinger grape and cultivating their Swabian dialect. The environs of Marbach epitomise the idea of ‘Kulturlandschaft’, was first formulated by the midnineteenth-century folklorist and social theorist Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl. Taken up by the German Naturschutz and Heimatschutz (Nature Conservation and Homeland Protection) movements, this ideal of an anthropogenic terrain blending the natural, cultivated and built environments in an aesthetically harmonious whole continues to inform German land use planning today.