ABSTRACT

This chapter challenges the distinction between environmental and cultural sustainability by focusing on their entanglement in German media discourse. As it is well-known, the notion of sustainability (‘Nachhaltigkeit’) has its roots in the forest management of the eighteenth century. Less known is that this plea for sustainable cultivation rested on the conviction that the forest has an ethical value. In the course of the nineteenth century, prominent ethnographers and writers established the ‘German forest’ and the ‘German oak’ as symbols of cultural identity. Scholars of literature and art history attempting to delineate the semantic contours of these symbols have so far concentrated on painting and poetry. In asking how these natural-cultural symbols were popularized among a greater audience, this chapter presents satirical texts and drawings from German magazines that demonstrate the entanglement of environmental and cultural sustainability discourses and document their semantic modification in a climate of growing nationalism. While earlier artworks manifest how the forest was considered an important source of cultural energy in the sense of artistic creativity, the ‘German Oak’ lost its innocence when it was associated with racist ideas. This chapter explores this process through the eyes of satirists, whose humorous critique represents a hitherto unknown counter-discourse.