Abstract
Widely vaunted in the nineteenth century as a national symbol, der deutsche Wald (the German forest) has been cast in a harshly negative light. The radical, völkisch nationalists’ embrace of the woods—an Urwald (primeval forest) inhabited by rooted peasants descended from tree-worshiping Teutonic warriors—supposedly attested to Germany’s atavism, irrationality, and flight from modernity.¹ Yet scholars recently have become skeptical of modernity itself, recognizing its ambivalent nature. Rather than believing a deficit of modernity lead to fascism, historians have concentrated their attention on the ways that the embrace of modernity contributed to the catastrophes of the twentieth century.² The