Jeffrey Wilson has written a valuable book about contests over the meanings of the forest in Imperial Germany. These debates mattered, both culturally and politically, because embedded in them were claims about the forms that national identity and social change should take in the era of unification. By examining these debates closely, indeed, Wilson offers a fresh perspective on Germans' fraught relationship with nature. An older historiographical school associated with George Mosse, Ulrich Linse, Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn, and others also drew attention to Germans' sylvan obsession but associated it mostly with bourgeois intellectuals and framed it as fundamentally antimodern. In contrast to this Sonderweg interpretation, Wilson aligns himself with a younger generation of scholars, including Thomas Lekan, William Rollins, and John Williams, all of whom have focused on a different group of actors, nature activists at the local level, and found in their sentiments and programs a more complex and ambivalent relationship to modernity. Wilson extends their findings by showing that “the German forest” was nothing if not a crucible of German modernity: a resource to be scientifically managed for the timber trade, an environment to preserve for its healthful benefits to an industrial and urban society, and a natural laboratory of inter-organismic cooperation and conflict that could usefully illuminate social dynamics in Germany's human world, too. Whatever their political orientation, in short, all of the players involved in the struggle for the German forest sought some accommodation with the needs of a rapidly urbanizing and industrializing society—that is, with German modernity.

Wilson develops this ambitious thesis in five well-conceived chapters. An introduction explores how foresters, ethnographers, botanists, historians, and Heimat activists began in the 1870s to infuse Germany's sylvan landscape with meanings relevant to a new nation. To them, the forest was a green band tying the entire country together as well as a landscape in which newly minted Germans could discover their historic commonality as a “forest folk.” The following three chapters provide fine-grained studies of public struggles centered on forests. Chapter two explores the battle over the Field and Forest Law of 1880. With this law, Junker landowners sought to exclude the public from hiking in their forests so that they could turn their woodlands over to the timber trade. Opposing them was an unlikely alliance composed of liberal social reformers and agrarian conservatives who saw publicly accessible forests as crucial to the health and viability of their respective constituencies: the urban working classes and small farmers. Next come two case studies. Chapter three investigates the battle that erupted in 1904 over Berlin's Grunewald Forest. Whereas the Prussian state regarded the forest as the property of the Kaiser and sought to turn it to money making, urban activists successfully convinced the city to buy the forest and turn it into a public place of healthful recreation for Berliners. Chapter four turns to the Tuchel Heath in the Prussian east, where conservative agrarians dominated and strife between Poles and Germans was sharp. Here, the state sought to reforest the Tuchel Heath, not because it had fantasies about restoring the area to some pristine state but because it sought to make a profit and ensure German dominance over this ethnically mixed region. A final chapter revisits intellectuals' love affair with the German forest, but resists the Sonderweg tendency to read it as a rejection of Enlightenment values in favor of völkisch (radical nationalist) ones. Wilson challenges this older historiography by exploring how a politically diverse group of popular scientific authors—including Emil Adolf Roßmäßler, Matthias Jakob Schleiden, Raoul Francé, and Rudolf Düesberg—used “the German forest” to draw lessons about the natural laws governing cooperation and conflict, laws that applied as much to trees and lichen as to social classes and even racial groups.

The book will be of particular interest to scholars of environmental history and German national identity. Some readers may tire of the frequent chapter-by-chapter references to the Sonderweg and others may find the biographical approach of chapter five an unsatisfying foray into intellectual history, but these will be small complaints. Looking at the forest through the eyes of a wide variety of actors, as Wilson does, reaffirms the previous generations' discovery that German forests were indeed discursively important in this period. At the same time, The German Forest also reveals that participants in these struggles, from left liberals to agrarian conservatives to state officials to Junker landlords, sought to use the forest as a tool for finding accommodation with a rapidly urbanizing and industrializing society. It was precisely because the forest was symbolically so important to those struggling to control Germany's modernity, indeed, that it became the center of such bitter debate in the Kaiserreich.