The People's Own Landscape

Series

• Social History, Popular Culture, and Politics in Germany

East Germany’s Socialist Unity Party aimed to placate a public well aware of the higher standards of living enjoyed elsewhere by encouraging them to participate in outdoor activities and take vacations in the countryside. Scott Moranda considers East Germany’s rural landscapes from the perspective of both technical experts (landscape architects, biologists, and physicians) who hoped to dictate how vacationers interacted with nature, and the vacationers themselves, whose outdoor experience shaped their understanding of environmental change. As authorities eliminated traditional tourist and nature conservation organizations, dissident conservationists demanded better protection of natural spaces. At the same time, many East Germans shared their government’s expectations for economic development that had real consequences for the land. By the 1980s, environmentalists saw themselves as outsiders struggling against the state and a public that had embraced mainstream ideas about limitless economic growth and material pleasures.

“Scott Moranda offers an innovative, well-researched, and carefully crafted examination of the relationship between tourism and environmental reform in the former German Democratic Republic . . . This is the first meaty investigation in English of GDR environmental history at the local level and, as such, will contribute to a number of growing fields of scholarship—European environmental history, the history of socialist states, 20th century German history, histories of everyday life, and tourism studies.”
—Thomas Lekan, University of South Carolina

Jacket image: Tourist map published by the Karl Marx City (now Chemnitz) district government’s department for recreation (Rat des Bezirkes Karl Marx Stadt, Abteilung Erholungswesen).

Scott Moranda is an Associate Professor of History at SUNY Cortland.

Praise / Awards

• "Apart from repeatedly connecting to the work of other scholars, Moranda also succinctly points to simplifications, generalizations, and silences within the historical record. For instance, he dismisses attempts to divide society and state within East Germany into “two different worlds” (pp. 8–9) and skillfully captures past and current trends within Eastern European environmental history."
  --Environmental History
• "The People’s Own Landscape is a welcome addition to histories of Communism and the growing field of European environmental history."
  --German History
• "The classic version of this story is one of environmental people power challenging the omnipresent state, but Scott Moranda’s study goes beyond that familiar narrative. Moranda’s strength lies in his ability to challenge traditional understandings of the relationship between environmentalism and state socialism."
  --German Studies Review
• "The People’s Own Landscape off ers impressive chronological scope, carefully tracing the evolution of landscape planning discussions throughout East Germany’s history as a state."
  --Slavic Review