A New Book on my Shelf

Rectifications along the Rhine
by Christopher Clark

review of David Blackbourn's THE CONQUEST OF NATURE Water, landscape and the making of modern Germany
512pp. Jonathan Cape. £30. 0 224 06071 6

In 1809, inspired by the Austrian campaign against Napoleon, the poet and sometime Prussian guards officer Heinrich von Kleist envisaged an all-out war against the French:

Whiten with their scattered bones
Every hollow, every hill;
From what was left by fox and crow
The hungry fish shall eat their fill;
Block the Rhine with their cadavers;
Until, plugged up by so much flesh,
It breaks its banks and surges west
To draw our borderline afresh!

What strikes one about these lines – apart from their brutality – is the strangeness of the notion that one might use the massed corpses of French soldiers as a means of correcting the course of the River Rhine. Kleist’s conceit was, of course, a sarcastic gloss on the contemporary French claim that the Rhine constituted the “natural frontier” of France. But it was also topical in another, seldom noted sense: in 1809, when he wrote those lines, plans really were afoot for a massive “rectification” of the Rhine.
The nineteenth-century transformation of the Rhine was the greatest civil engineering scheme that had ever been undertaken in German Europe. For centuries, the river’s meandering waters had flowed through an archipelago of thickly wooded islands. Its navigable course constantly shifted, sometimes twice or three times a year. On those stretches of the upper Rhine where it passed between France and the territories of the Holy Roman Empire, this meant that an island or village that was French one year might find itself on the German side of the border in the following spring.
All this changed after the rectifications. Under the indefatigable supervision of the Badenese engineer Johann Gottfried Tulla, the river was rechannelled through a system of cuts, excavations and embankments over 354 kilometres of its length, from the Swiss border at Basel to the Hessian border at Worms. The multiple tributaries and deviations of the Rhine valley were marshalled into a single bed, with (in Tulla’s words) “gentle curves adapted to nature or . . . where it is practicable, a straight line”. The object was to banish for ever the unpredictable floods that periodically devastated the towns and villages of the Rhine Valley and to create a faster, deeper, shorter river whose formerly marshy plain could be turned over to agriculture.
More than 2,000 islands and outcrops – comprising a billion square metres of real estate – were excavated out of existence. Their substance was used as landfill for a massive chain of main dykes. Immense stocks of timber were consumed to shore up the cuts and embankments. As the engineers gradually tautened the river, its length fell, for the stretch between Basel and Worms, from 354 to 273 kilometres. The work was long (it took half a century to complete) and arduous, but also politically delicate. Along those stretches where the river was an international border, there were protracted negotiations with the French. There was also bitter domestic opposition to the scheme, especially from towns that stood to lose their access to the river, and those that faced the prospect of being stranded on the wrong bank.
As David Blackbourn shows in this wide-ranging and highly original study, the management of water has been central to the making of modern Germany. The Conquest of Nature opens on the floodplains of the Oder River, drained and converted to agriculture during the reign of Frederick the Great. Then we move west to the Upper Rhine and from there to Jade Bay on the North Sea coast of Oldenburg, a place of sodden moors, malodorous mudflats and devastating storm floods, and thence to the colossal dam-building schemes of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. At every point, Blackbourn brings home the epic scale of the human effort required to discipline the great watercourses. The drainage and rectification works on the Oder River were carried out over many years of exhausting toil by thousands of shovel-wielding labourers and soldiers, working waist deep in malarial swamps. The construction of the Prussian harbour facilities on the mudflats of what would become Wilhelmshaven on Jade Bay cost the lives of 247 labourers. When its retaining wall was completed, after six years of construction work, on June 26, 1914, the Edertal Dam was the largest in Europe, its waters stretching for sixteen miles over a valley floor dotted with drowned villages and farms.
One could tell the story of this “war with water” as a narrative of progress, in which humans gradually secured mastery over the most mercurial and dangerous element in their natural environment. This was certainly the way many contemporaries saw it. The reclamations – not only of the Oder floodplain, but of numerous marshes and wetlands across the kingdom of Prussia – were a stock theme in the literary hero-cult that sprang up after the death of Frederick the Great in 1786. No less mythopoeic were the great river-valley dams, whose vast ramparts and turbines were objects of wonder, a German analogue to the “technological sublime” Americans discerned in the awesome contours of the Hoover Dam. Contemporaries wrote in triumphant tones of the “subjugation of natural forces and the conquest of the earth”.
There is something to be said for this narrative of progress. In the drained Oder floodplains, malaria swiftly receded, as standing waters evaporated and dairy cattle replaced humans as the preferred source of blood. The opportunist diseases – pneumonia, dysentery and so on – that preyed on populations infected with the malaria parasite were soon also in retreat. As the vast areas of reclaimed land, rich with centuries of alluvial silt deposits, began to yield grain and pasture, there were signs of real prosperity among the settlers brought in to people the land.
And yet at the same time, Blackbourn observes, there was a price to pay for every major intervention in the life of the great watercourses. The Oder floodplain had sustained a unique way of life for centuries before it was drowned under grain and grass. Communities of fishing folk had found ingenious local solutions to the unstable conditions of the plain, supplementing their catches of pike, bream, burbot, lamprey and eel with vegetables grown on dykes fashioned of twigs, mud and animal dung. Their specialized skills and idiosyncratic culture disappeared in the aftermath of the reclamations. On the Rhine, successive manipulations of the river brought a drastic decline in biodiversity. The myriad fish-life of the old Rhine plain was largely destroyed, making way for a cruder ecosystem dominated by the zander and the eel and the dense webs of wild fruit trees, oak, elm, alder, willow and water-meadows that had once flanked the river were replaced by the patchworked monocultures of modern agriculture.
All this might conceivably have been a price worth paying if the rectifications had banished for ever the ancient menace of the flood. But, as Blackbourn points out, they had the opposite effect. The faster, deeper rivers produced by reclamation and rectification flooded less often, but more catastrophically – witness the devastating floods of 1983, 1988, 1993 and 1994 on the Middle and Lower Rhine. Koblenz, Bonn and Cologne are now more at risk than they were before Tulla began redirecting the river in the 1810s. The Oder, too, remains a danger zone. In 1997, heavy summer rains, exacerbated by deforestation and stream regulation in the river’s uplands, drove the Oder to break its banks, claiming 100 lives and inundating 1,200 villages, mostly in Poland and the Czech Republic. The old Oder floodplain, now densely populated, would have been under metres of water if 30,000 Bundeswehr soldiers and 20,000 civilian volunteers had not worked frantically to reinforce the dykes, while helicopters circled overhead, dropping sandbags into weakened sections that threatened to open up under the weight of the swollen river. Even the great dams, once celebrated as the ultimate symbol of human mastery over water, brought dangers in their wake. Quite apart from the ecological damage they inflict, there is evidence to suggest that dams cause heightened seismic instability. They also remove the debris and sediment from rivers, increasing the risk that lighter, faster-running streams will scour their beds, killing vegetation and depressing the water table. And during the Second World War the great dams offered vulnerable targets for aerial bombing, as the inhabitants of the Eder and Möhne valleys discovered after the RAF’s early-morning dam-busting raid on May 17, 1943.
After 1945, the problems of flooding and access in times of shortage were eclipsed by pollution, a pestilence that threatened to remove every last trace of animal life from the river system. By the early 1960s, a blend of industrial effluent, chemical run-offs from agriculture, and household waste had transformed much of the German water system into a toxic sewer. On some canals the foam towered twelve feet over the waterline. Over large stretches of its length, the Rhine was biologically dead by the 1970s. The turning point for West Germany came with the evolution of the environmentalist movement into a major political force. By the mid-1980s, key “green” objectives had been incorporated into the programmes of the major political parties, and the Rhine was recovering from the near-death experience of the previous decade. Blackbourn contrasts these developments with East Germany, where the socialist regime continued to cling to its own dilapidated version of the technological sublime, with horrific environmental consequences. A range of environmentalist groups did struggle into existence in the GDR, but they were easily infiltrated and undermined by the Stasi. Only after 1989 could the restoration of the East German waterways begin.
It is a distinguishing feature of modernity that human beings have often imagined themselves in a state of “war” with the natural environment. The metaphor implies a linkage between mastery over natural resources and the domination and destruction of human beings. At particular times, notably in the history of anglophone colonial settlement, the struggle to secure control over resources became intertwined with the more or less systematic destruction of indigenous peoples and their way of life.
Nowhere, Blackbourn observes, were the potentialities of the relationship more brutally realized than in the Third Reich, where the metaphorical nexus between reclamation and race hardened into a policy of genocide. For Hitler, the conquered Soviet Union was Europe’s counterpart to the American Wild West, a vast untamed resource whose exploitation must inevitably involve the enslavement or extermination of its indigenous human inhabitants. The Racial Resettlement Officials of the Third Reich spoke of “dyking” the East against the Slavic hordes and of reclaiming the marshlands of Russia for “resettlement” by Germanic farming families. When Kleist imagined damming the Rhine with French cadavers, it was no more than a gruesome wordplay. But Otto Rasch, commander of Einsatzgruppe C, spoke in deadly earnest when he proposed in the summer of 1941 that “superfluous masses” of Jews be “used up” in drainage works on the vast marshlands of the Pripet.
Blackbourn does not exactly “think like a river”, as the environmentalist historian Donald Worster has suggested we should, but his book has a meandering, riverine motion. This has something to do with the subject matter. Throughout The Conquest of Nature, the reader senses the mobile energy of water, as alarming when it rises as when it retreats. Blackbourn weaves elegantly among the disciplines, integrating the histories of science, technology, politics, diplomacy, culture and ecology into a nuanced and many-layered analysis of change. He constantly shifts the perspective, so that we hear from the beneficiaries and enthusiasts of the great water management projects, but also from those who suffered the consequences of river rectifications and drainage schemes. His protagonists include engineers, fisherfolk and peasants, but also eels, alders and beetles. But if the book has an unconventional, circuitous feel, this is, above all, because Blackbourn refuses to buy into either of the two most familiar narratives of environmental change. This is not the story of how a pristine environment was corrupted by greedy humans, nor does it tell a tale of steady improvement. Instead, Blackbourn holds both narratives in tension, making us see, by virtue of a kind of double exposure, how both are true.
David Blackbourn’s writing has always been informed by a critical awareness of how grand narratives – whether pessimistic or optimistic – can distort and impoverish our understanding by imposing retrospective coherence on a profusion of contradictory impulses. In The Peculiarities of German History, the influential essay he published with Geoff Eley in 1980 (first issued in English in 1984) Blackbourn took the “critical school” of German historians to task for suggesting that the German past should be conceptualized in terms of a “special path” (Sonderweg) leading from the failed Revolutions of 1848 to the advent of the Nazi regime in 1933. In other studies, he opened up the history of modern German Catholicism, liberalism and political mobilization in ways that unsettle our assumptions about what was “progressive” and what was not. It is in keeping with this anti-teleological cast of mind that The Conquest of Nature should end where it begins, on the fortified banks of the River Oder. Here, it seems, the struggle between humans and water has turned full circle. During the floods of 1997, it was widely observed that localized spillovers on the Upper Oder helped to prevent worse inundations further downstream. Most experts on the river’s management now agree that the best safeguard against future disasters lies in dismantling the great dykes and pulling them back from the river. Two and a half centuries after the reclamations began, the Oder is to be returned to the liberty of its ancestral floodplain.