Books with titles including the words ‘nature’, ‘environment’, ‘landscape’ and/or ‘nation’ have proliferated recently, witnessing to a general enthusiasm for the topic. As often, however, the enthusiasm breaks down into a variety of problems and approaches which need to be analysed in more detail. The works to be discussed in this article belong to three different categories, of which the first, including Ely's This Meager Nature, Corbett, Holt and Russell's The Geographies of Englishness and Kreilkamp's Eire/Land, focuses on the construction of landscape identities basically through art – both painting and literature. Lekan's Imagining the Nation in Nature is a study of German environmental policies from the end of the nineteenth century up to the collapse of the Nazi regime, while Walter's Les figures paysagères de la nation looks at the way in which landscape came to be an expression of nationhood in Europe from the sixteenth to the twentieth century.

Most of these works are part of the recent upsurge in research on nation-building in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. More precisely, they relate to modernist or constructivist theories of nationhood, which see nations and nationalism as phenomena that arose subsequent to the French Revolution, linked to aspects of modernity such as capitalism, industrialisation, the birth of the bureaucratic state, urbanisation, secularisation and so on. Nations and nationalism were, in fact, inventions. Our authors argue, however, that the factors governing the creation of nationhood may be very diverse: economic, political, social, cultural or a combination thereof. In contrast to this modernist approach, ‘ethno-symbolists’ such as Anthony Smith stress continuity, the persistence of myths, symbols and values from the past which still strengthen and give meaning to the modern nation. The works we are dealing with here all assume that nationhood is an invention, a construct; their main interest is the cultural factors in that construct, most particularly those of landscape and territory.

In 1989 Orvar Löfgren published a seminal article entitled ‘The Nationalization of Culture’, proposing landscape as one element in the blueprint for the construction of national identity in the nineteenth century.Footnote ¹ This insight was not immediately taken up, insofar as viewing nation-building through the optic of landscape implied a twofold culturalist diffraction, since it meant basing the nation – a cultural construct – on landscape, something exceedingly complex in itself. Landscape is complex because it is to a large extent fabricated by the person seeing it, as Serge Briffaut has noted: ‘if we speak of “landscape” without evoking the spectator, who draws on his own sensibility and, more broadly, on his whole culture in order to objectify that landscape and endow it with significance, the very notion of landscape loses its specificity’ (quoted in Walter, p. 301). This twofold diffraction is a difficult concept to manage and none of the works being reviewed here gives us more than a partial analysis of it.

Walter's book is by far the widest-ranging, encompassing four centuries and several European countries. We have become accustomed to the uncritical belief that a country can be identified with a particular form of landscape, an identification reinforced by mass communication and tourism. It is this belief that Walter sets out to demolish. His book is dense and exciting, but, it must be admitted, difficult to read. The four-century timescale, the multiple approaches, the superabundance of references to different countries not infrequently obscure the argument. The first part, substantial in itself, focuses on the idea of territory and the perception of differences; the second studies the links between landscape and identity, and is of more interest to us here because it engages with the idea of nation-building, the common thread that runs through all the works being reviewed. Walter insists that to identify a country – for simplicity's sake let us say a nation, although it would be more accurate to say ‘monarchy’, ‘state’, ‘principality’ or ‘people’, as and when appropriate – with a landscape was neither a natural nor an immediate step to take. He suggests that we have in fact moved away from what Foucault would call a discursive formation, the ‘age of the territory’ as one might say, dominated by an analogical mode of thought that goes right back to antiquity, and which links places with human characteristics by virtue of stereo- or ethno-types. Ever since Genesis landscapes have been defined according to the characteristics of the races that inhabit them; and classical and medieval authors regularly associated racial characteristics with the soils and climate of their homelands. A sixteenth-century Spanish doctor in the tradition of Hippocrates and Galen, Juan Harte (1530–92), wrote: ‘The character of the mind depends on the temperament of the body in which it dwells; according to the heat, cold, humidity or dryness of the places men inhabit, and the air they breathe, some are foolish and others wise; some brave and others cowards; some cruel and others merciful.’ Such differences, he continues, can also be detected within a single country, such as his own Spain, where he distinguishes between northerners, ‘who are all slow of wit’, and the inhabitants of the central regions, ‘between the torrid and burning zone and the north, who are all wise and prudent’ (Walter, pp. 38–9). This is a fine example of the analogical thinking described by Foucault in The Archaeology of Knowledge, the kind of thinking which can describe the English metaphorically as suffering from excessive humidity of the brain, which makes them pale-faced and yellow-skinned! And by extension, such physical characteristics can be coupled with moral virtues and character traits.

Even in the early eighteenth century we find a number of descriptions of places in association with their inhabitants. Scotland, for example, being barren and wild, is inhabited by an intractable and cunning race whom Defoe equates with the cannibals and savages to be found in distant lands; the Scots are superior to such only by reason of their Christianity. In 1709 Paul Berckenmeyer published a work called Curieuser Antiquarius (of which several editions appeared up to 1729), which classifies nations according to a taxonomy that is indeed curious. First he names their favourite musical instrument: for Italy the guitar, for Spain the castanets, for France the lute, for Ireland the harp, for Germany the trumpet, and so on. He goes on to define and classify them according to their character, size, foods, marriage customs and women, and finally associates them with animals: the Spaniard is like a bird, the Genoese a fish, the Frenchman an eagle, the Italian a fox and so on. All these analogies finally boil down to the effect of climate. The real begetter of this theory was the sixteenth-century savant Jean Bodin in Book V, chapter 1 of his Republic, published in 1576 – though Bodin prudently stops short of arbitrary determinism. Montesquieu takes up the climate theory, but grafts on a scientific explanation and gives the whole thing a political slant.

The second great innovation of the eighteenth century was to associate national character with physical appearance: ‘Individuals belonging to a certain nation have certain characteristics in common, which easily identify them as belonging to that nation.’ Here, physiognomy joins the criteria for defining a nation. The idea had been around for a long time, allegedly since Aristotle; it came into its own at the turn of the seventeenth century, but was not then applied to the classification of nations.

The ‘age of the territory’ was succeeded by ‘the age of landscape’, culminating in the period between 1760 and 1850 and extending up to the Second World War. To Walter this represents a shift from ‘the imposing of alterity to the shaping of identity’. This was when great national ‘cycles’ were forged, fashioning shared identities by exploiting their ‘natural’ environment: landscape became ‘a function of ideology’ within parameters that are still familiar to us today. Walter examines territoriality as an exercise in spatial identity, in other words, the way in which an actor takes root or attaches himself to a particular space of living or acting, thus reflecting back the self-image created by actors belonging to a particular territory. This concept of territoriality as a process of taking root has a long history, beginning in antiquity and continuing up to the present day. In the nineteenth century the binomial rooted/uprooted opposition (as in Maurice Barrès's 1897 novel Les Déracinés, ‘The Uprooted’) took on a strongly national, not to say nationalist, significance. Territory was the cradle of the nation, the original space containing all the qualities to be attributed to the future nation, complementing the origin myth which traced nations back to such fabulous ancestor figures as Aeneas or Noah. The point of this is always to relate the nation to a past which legitimates its existence. Here, Walter attempts to transcend constructivist approaches to nationhood (such as Gellner's or Anderson's) by treating landscape not just as a discursive process but also as a series of contexts for various social actors. A multiplicity of ideological contexts contribute to this symbolic investment of the landscape by elites who hold the monopoly over knowledge, the same elites appear in studies by Miroslav HrochFootnote ² as the architects of nation-building.

Walter gives some examples of this process, borrowing from recent work on Germany (a field that has been thoroughly ploughed),Footnote ³ SwitzerlandFootnote ⁴ and Italy. Landscape was an important factor in the creation of German national culture, although it presents substantial difficulties of ‘application’. As a loose agglomeration of hundreds of tiny states, presenting a huge variety of landscapes, Germany took a long time to decide on an identifying landscape. Even as late as 1924 the historian Gerhard Ritter was rehashing the idea of the eighteenth-century geographer Friedrich Ratzel that the German landscape was essentially unfinished and that what distinguished it was precisely the great diversity of its landscapes, which mirrored its internal tensions. However, the Romantics took hold of symbols such as Cologne Cathedral (as studied by Thomas Nipperdey) and the statue of Arminius (Hermann), and also of certain landscapes which could be ‘territorialised’ and rendered symbolic. Advocates of this approach claimed that landscape, unlike monuments or historical events, had the great advantage of being comprehensible and accessible to, and able to inspire affection in, anybody and everybody whatever their social or cultural level. And yet landscape itself was intensely symbolic, indeed a construct. One of the most striking examples of this must be the early nineteenth-century painter Caspar David Friedrich, who portrayed fragmentary landscapes, or rather natural elements, with a heavy overlay of nascent national consciousness. Thus forests became a symbol of Germany, while the Teutoburg forest, where Arminius destroyed the legions of Varus, became a symbol of German resistance to foreign domination. The Rhine valley, lauded by poets and portrayed in innumerable paintings and engravings, was another nationalised ‘territory’. The fact remained that it was hard to think of such landscapes as ‘national’.

Confino's The Nation as a Local Metaphor successfully combines the theme of nationhood with landscape study, in an attempt to understand the particularity of Germany. He sees it as the outcome of a negotiation between local and national levels of national memory that continued throughout the nineteenth century. Confino sees the construction of national memory as an iconographic process of which landscape is an integral part: by combining the notions of national memory and imagined community, one can reach an understanding of how the people were able to visualise that impersonal thing, a nation, and of how the Germans created an iconographical stereotype of themselves and their landscape by putting the two sets of memories – local and national – together. This takes national feeling beyond the merely discursive and attaches it to concrete experience of which landscape is the vector. After 1871 the notion of Heimat was used to mediate between the local level – immediate, lived experience – and the more distant Vaterland at ‘national’ level. This symbolic, patriotic investment of local feeling is inseparable from its late-nineteenth-century context: it can be seen as a counterweight to the rapid transformation of the landscape and the ever-increasing pace of social change. People(s) all over the Western world were inventing traditions so as to strengthen national roots. Few nations were changing faster than Germany, where the industrial revolution was late but radical, and urbanisation rapid. The first wave of change struck in a climate of enthusiasm and confidence in progress; but by the end of the century, with a slowdown in economic growth, confidence seemed to falter and the cultural cost of industrialisation began to seem excessive. Criticism took many forms, not least the condemnation of damage to the environment. Here Confino locates what he calls the ‘heimatising’ of the German nation: its reconfiguration as a familiar, well-loved visual image. Landscape becomes a landscape of reference, a natural landscape which deserves protection owing to its beauty. Thus the notion of Heimat, incarnate in landscape, becomes the common denominator of community, whether that community is real or imagined, tangible or symbolic. Confino sees German national feeling as being grounded in a ‘nation of Heimats’ and an iconography that merges local, regional and national space in a series of interchangeable representations.

Celia Applegate has shown that although the Heimat idea appears to be politically conservative, it would be quite wrong to describe it as intrinsically reactionary. While expressions of German local patriotism may sometimes sound a potentially xenophobic, racial or völkisch note, such discourse existed alongside interpretations that were ruralist, pluralist or even democratic. ‘Heimatising’ could be both an adjunct to – or negotiation of – the establishment of a modern, liberal nation-state, and a reaction to the consequences of any such establishment. Heimat societies – the English equivalent might be a society of local historians or antiquarians – engaged in all kinds of research into folklore, dialect, vernacular architecture and natural resources. All this helped to give their native country a real, concrete existence, but also gave large sections of the German population, including white-collar workers, members of the liberal professions and petty bourgeois, a civic consciousness and integrated them with the community. One such activity, which was peculiarly German, was the protection of the landscape. An interesting aspect of this approach, amply illustrated by Confino and Appelgate, is that it brokered the relationship between the local and the national. Local feeling – the Heimat – was not inimical to national feeling, but an integral part of it. In point of fact the French Republic also fostered this sense of local patriotism, although within different parameters, as a precursor of the feeling of belonging to a wider national space. Jean-François Chanet, for example, has shown that attachment to one's own locality, to the terroir, was thought to be an important item in the mental equipment of the Republic's trainee schoolteachers. Walter, referring to Italy, draws on recent work on the instrumentalisation of mountains by late nineteenth-century bourgeois elites, and the links that were made between the sense of identity and the sport of mountain-climbing, which persisted until the Fascist period. However, Walter lays insufficient stress on the extreme fragmentation of Italian identity and the multiplicity of possible landscapes available to it. If Italians took mountains as the markers of their national identity it was only in the north; it would scarcely occur to an inhabitant of Tuscany or Calabria. Walter can also be accused of failing to consider the importance of urban landscapes as a key element in Italian identity. During the unification the most widespread territorial symbol was in fact ‘Italy of the hundred cities’.

Walter goes on to examine the individuals who contributed to this instrumentalisation of landscape for nationalist purposes, pointing out the perceptible shifts in appreciations of landscapes and their social and political connotations. In conclusion, he discusses the political exploitation of landscape analogies. Initially focused on the ideas of ‘the fair country’ or ‘God's own country’, such discourse began to shift after the French Revolution, whose leaders supplemented their passion for the language of organisation and administration with the theme of ‘natural landscape’. Similarly, after the First World War territorial boundaries were settled by combining rules of ethnographic distribution with notions of natural boundaries that have ‘always been there’: Czechoslovakia, for example, was created on the basis of arguments such as ‘Bohemia is a natural region clearly delineated by its surrounding mountains’ (p. 141). Walter's final port of call is the ‘totalitarian landscape’ of Nazi Germany, which was more ‘biological’ than in any way aesthetic. Displaced populations, the extermination of the Jews and the colonisation of conquered territory all followed the logic of biological redistribution aimed at preserving the ‘Germanness’ of the relevant areas.

This question is also discussed by Thomas Lekan's book on landscape preservation in Germany. This excellent study, which began life as a dissertation prepared at the University of Wisconsin under the supervision of Rudy Koschar, looks at the conservation and preservation of nature in Germany from the late nineteenth century to the Nazi era. At the end of the nineteenth century, acceptance of the iconography of local patriotism nurtured a gathering sense of the urgent need to protect the natural environment – the landscape. A number of authors, of whom the best-known is the conservative theoretician Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl, argued that preserving nature and the environment was the only way to preserve national character. What degree of continuity was there between this Wilhelmine environmentalism and the Nazis, who in 1935 passed one of the most advanced environmental protection laws of the time? Was the Nazi legislation a forerunner of the contemporary Green movement? What links the Wilhelmine ‘preservationists’ with Nazi Blut und Boden?

Historians have traditionally seen the ‘back to the soil’ movement of Wilhelm II's time, which continued under Weimar, as a kind of proto-fascism. They have seen the German bourgeoisie's aesthetic preference for an ‘unchanging’ landscape as the mark of a profoundly conservative, not to say feudal, social outlook favouring the reassertion of aristocratic privilege against the demands of the masses. This rather teleological approach has been disputed recently by authors who have shown that many leaders of Heimatschutz or Naturschutz (local or environmental protection) movements were urban dwellers who saw industrialisation as a necessary evil which could, however, be contained in a good aesthetic or environmental cause. The cultural historian William Rollins has revealed the eminently pragmatic, or even technical, nature of their proposals for environmental protection, far removed from any Romantic or ‘ideological’ discourse and often advocated by liberals, reformers or democrats. The approach was very like those then being advocated by the US Sierra Club or with Britain's National Trusts, both bourgeois, paternalist organisations. They did not reject modernity, but they wanted it in a different and improved form.

These historical revisions, however, leave one important question unanswered. If the preservation of landscape, including the local environment, was a creative endeavour, a well-informed and rational response to the crisis of modernisation, why is it that many of its protagonists were also committed and active Nazis, such as the minister for agriculture, Richard Walther Darré, and the forestry minister, Walter von Keudell, both of whom were out to ‘racialise the landscape’?

According to Lekan, this strong rightward inclination was underlain by a number of factors which influenced the Naturschutz movement: the ‘militarisation’ of Heimat rhetoric during the First World War, during which pluralist concepts of the nation fell out of favour now that it was at war and under threat; the rapprochement between preservation organisations and government under Weimar; and the tendency of preservationists in the 1920s to reject modernism as they had not done in the decades before the war. Lekan also shows that despite the 1935 law, the Nazi attitude to environmental protection was in fact ambiguous: in the first place, its implementation was uneven and fragmentary owing to the effects of local and regional decision making; secondly, and surprisingly enough for a totalitarian state, it lacked co-ordination at national level. Moreover, the Reich made no bones about sacrificing environmental policies to economic or military interests.

This book is of interest not only to specialists in contemporary German history but also to environmental historians. It covers some of the same ground as Walter, particularly in its attention to actors, their careers and their ideologies: though their initial premises were poles apart, the attitudes of these actors tended to converge on a close engagement with the environment and the preservation of nature. Lekan, however, focuses chiefly on the genealogy of environmentalism in Germany – with exciting results.