Over the half century following the Second World War, Berlin transformed from a “rubble” city to a divided, but “green” city (4–5). In this unconventional and innovative monograph, the anthropologist Bettina Stoetzer explores the diverse manifestations, meanings, and experiences of nature in Berlin, including official and unofficial urban gardens and parks, as well as forests on the eastern periphery of the city. In these “ruderal” spaces, invasive plants, rogue gardens, and immigrant solidarities have taken root and flourished, along with racism and structural violence connected to colonial visions of natural and national purity.
Stoetzer takes the title of her book from an obscure botanical term, ruderal, referring to vegetation growing in disturbed landscapes. Stoetzer sees Berlin—destroyed by war, rebuilt in the socialist and capitalist idioms of an assertive, but insecure modernism—as both a material and metaphorical ruderal city. Literally built on and with rubble, Berlin’s parks, gardens, and unofficial green spaces have sprouted diverse flora, practices, and imaginaries amid the ruins. At the same time, Stoetzer employs the “ruderal city” as “a framework for thinking about the heterogeneity of urban life in the ruins of European nationalism and capitalism” and “in the cracks of systems of urban governance and formal institutions” (4). Ruderal spaces not only provide opportunities for self-assertion and community-building, but they also become focal points for anxiety, racism, and repression.
West German botanists began studying rubble ecologies in the 1950s, documenting thriving communities of invasive plants in Berlin’s “blasted landscapes” (35). Sticky goosefoot, an aromatic Mediterranean bush that arrived in Central Europe via Istanbul, did particularly well in Berlin’s extensive piles of rubble. During the rapid economic (re)growth of West Germany in the 1960s, Turkish transplants (guest workers) also moved to West Berlin, diversifying the urban fabric and disrupting deeply rooted, and exclusionary, German understandings of nationhood and homeland (Heimat).
Much of Stoetzer’s book focuses on the experiences of immigrants and refugees in the green spaces of Berlin and its forested periphery. Aging and disabled Turkish residents not only cultivate makeshift gardens in parks and courtyards, fostering community, but also conflict with rules and norms governing urban green space. Unemployed Asian immigrants gather in a Wilmersdorf park to share (and sell) food, gamble, and socialize, offending “German cultural assumptions about how to inhabit urban nature” (106) and drawing sporadic, and largely ineffective, efforts to enforce public health regulations.
On warm summer weekends, Turkish families turn out by the thousands to barbecue in Berlin’s parks. Citing excessive smoke and garbage that defile the urban greenery, city authorities try to limit and regulate public barbecues, culminating in a much-contested (and ignored) ban on barbecuing in the Tiergarten, Berlin’s largest park. Stoetzer’s ethnography foregrounds her interlocutors’ narratives of self-expression, community, and belonging in the city’s green spaces but also conveys their persistent struggles with racial profiling, selective policing, and the hardships of structural inequality.
Stoetzer’s book next turns to the forested countryside east of Berlin, a ruderal landscape of a different sort. Facing severe economic decline after the end of East Germany in 1990, the post-unification government tried to reinvigorate the region by creating several “wild” nature parks in the sparsely populated forests stretching from Berlin to Poland. In a sequence of linked vignettes, Stoetzer explores nature tourism, rewilding, and the housing of African refugees in the forests of Brandenburg.
The “wild” and the “bush” take on very different meanings for ecotourists on “safari” and for African refugees exiled to former East German barracks deep in the forest. Intentionally isolated, unable to work legally, and stuck in bureaucratic limbo, refugees experience the forest as an embodiment of the “racial exclusions, displacements, and the violence of the asylum system” (234). While Stoetzer finds some agency in the refugees’ storytelling and humor surrounding their experience, the overall story is grim, a reminder of the persistent “specter of the colonial” and colonial racism in Euro-American approaches to migration (238).
Though Stoetzer tries to balance stories of agency with those of repression, pessimism with optimism, her epilogue focuses primarily on the “racialized crisis of hospitality” that has pervaded European and American public life in the first quarter of the twentieth century (239). Her intention is that “a ruderal analytic” can also evoke possibility and hope. After all, rubble does eventually sprout new growth, and it’s often not what we expect.
