Saving Nature Under Socialism
Transnational Environmentalism in East Germany, 1968 – 1990

Traces the evolution of environmental policy and protest in East Germany and central Europe during the Cold War.

Julia E. Ault (Author)

9781316519141, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 9 September 2021

278 pages
23.5 x 15.8 x 2 cm, 0.54 kg

'Julia Ault demands we widen the lens beyond 1989 and the borders of the GDR. Ault argues that environmentalism and environmental thought had a longer and often contradictory history that dated back to the country's founding … [this is] a comprehensive history of state and nonstate actors, laws, institutions, and ideas about nature in the GDR. Ault shows how environmental thought was not a Western import but had taken root prior to 1949 and then expanded and evolved over the next four decades.' Thomas Fleischman, Agricultural History

When East Germany collapsed in 1989–1990, outside observers were shocked to learn the extent of environmental devastation that existed there. The communist dictatorship, however, had sought to confront environmental issues since at least the 1960s. Through an analysis of official and oppositional sources, Saving Nature Under Socialism complicates attitudes toward the environment in East Germany by tracing both domestic and transnational engagement with nature and pollution. The communist dictatorship limited opportunities for protest, so officials and activists looked abroad to countries such as Poland and West Germany for inspiration and support. Julia Ault outlines the evolution of environmental policy and protest in East Germany and shows how East Germans responded to local degradation as well as to an international moment of environmental reckoning in the 1970s and 1980s. The example of East Germany thus challenges and broadens our understanding of the 'greening' of post-war Europe, and illuminates a larger, central European understanding of connection across the Iron Curtain.

Introduction
1. Balancing Economy and Ecology: Building toward Environmental Protection, 1945–1970
2. 'Socialist Environmentalism': Between Practice and Ideal, 1971–1982
3. Church, Faith, and Nature: An Alternative Environmentalism, 1972–1983
4. Intertwining Environmentalisms: Transboundary Pollution and Protest in Central Europe
5. Coming out from behind the Cloud: Environmentalism after Chernobyl
6. Growing Together? The Environment in the Collapse of Communism
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Conservation of the environment [RNK], Environmentalist thought & ideology [RNA], Political structure & processes [JPH], European history [HBJD]