Abstract
Based on a just-completed book, this paper presents the framework of “mnemonic ecologies” to explore the nexus of memory and conservation in landscapes of post-violence. My case study is the former Cold War borderland between socialist East and capitalist West Germany. This region was the location of the most militarized border infrastructure the world had seen at the time. Between 1949 and 1989, dozens of villages were razed to make way for the border’s construction, and hundreds of East Germans died in their attempt to escape to the West. At the same time, the border depopulated central Germany, and in this new human vacuum hundreds of endangered plant and animal species found refuge from agricultural and urban expansion elsewhere, in the process creating new, emergent ecologies. When the border regime collapsed in 1989, West and East German conservationists began converting the border region into a protected area called the “Green Belt.” It is a controversial project, often opposed by landowners and farmers who fear renewed state expropriation and a “greenwashing” of a painful past. Drawing on eight years of ethnographic and archival research, this paper explores the strengths and limitations of conservation here, focusing on environmental, political, and cultural strategies that curate the past and the border’s crumbling remains in ways that elevate some layers of memory while erasing others. I ultimately argue that by attending to traumatic histories and honoring emotional attachments to landscape, conservation–in Germany and beyond–can become a more multidisciplinary, empathetic, and effective process.
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Biodiversity Conservation; Environmental History; Memory; Landscapes; Post-Violence; Novel Ecosystems; Germany
