Books & Profiles

Die Natur der Gefahr traces the history of the Ohio river, its significance for trade and industry, and its flooding disasters between the late eighteenth century through to the twentieth century.

Natur und Industrie im Sozialismus challenges common conceptions that portray the environmental history of East Germany as one of decline, highlighting the existence of advocates of environmental measures within the socialist party.

Die Hamburger Sturmflut von 1962 is an in-depth historical study of the 1962 storm flood that devastated Hamburg and Germany. It compares the flood to others in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, while reflecting on the sociocultural and technological contexts of the time.

Weltmeere examines society’s relationship with the oceans in the nineteenth century, through subjects such as whale fishing, polar expeditions, the sea in literature and psychology, and marine studies.

Wasser correlates the control of water supply with power in a comparative collection of articles on water in ancient, early modern, and modern states.

Projektion Natur is a collection of articles contextualising “green” genetic engineering within the debate about nature and society.

Schlangenlinien examines the history of the European Viper and the shift from extermination policies to those of protection and rehabilitation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Euer Dorf soll schöner werden captures the transformation of Germany’s rural landscape through modernization between 1961 and 1979, through the inter-village contest, “Unser Dorf soll schöner werden” (“May our village become more beautiful”).

Umwelt als Ressource highlights the interaction and co-evolution of modern industry and the environment, using the example of the German paper industry in Saxony.

Beschädigte Vegetation und sterbender Wald traces the history of the environmental problem of air pollution and its damaging effects on forests in Germany.