Keywords

Germany, forest, woods trees, environment, nationalism, history, philosophy, art, literature, wilderness

Abstract

In a "House of Learning" lecture in the Harold B. Lee Library in October, 2008, Richard Hacken gave this presentation, a combination of text and images. Coming from the history of ideas, this retrospective of the German woods looked at historical, linguistic, artistic, philosophical, political, literary, cultural, and of course botanical aspects of the German forest. In summary, five major forest themes arise from Germans imagining their own German woods: (1) taming the external and internal wilderness; (2) establishing social justice; (3) advocating national unity; (4) maintaining a sense of the sacred; and (5) encouraging ecological awareness.