Politicized Timber: Imagined Landscapes of the German Forest 1800-1945

Forests not only constitute natural landscapes to harvest timber or to go hiking in. Beyond that, they are also ideal landscapes constructed by intellectual and/or ideological orchestration. This paper delineates the various forest imaginations in German political thought between the period of Romanticism and the rule of National Socialism. Special focus is given to those mental images of the forest related to myth-conceptions like national identity, ethnic community, and racial purity. Here, the German Forest evolved from a poetical landscape of yearning into a Social Darwinian paradigm legitimizing the polity and politics of a dictatorship.