Abstract
Concerning the environment in Germany, the classical nature conservation idea was prevalent during the turn of the century until the Weimar Republic. Its public articulation of "life"-movements was permeated by anti industrial romanticism. Its topics were the preservation of landscape, the creation of "nature monuments", the protection of animals, nudism ("Freikörperkultur") etc. Another topic is the demand of the worker’s movement to create housing conditions in line with those of the middle classes, creating the concept of the garden town ("Gartenstadt"). After the devastations brought about by National Socialism and World War II, the Germans were preoccupied with creating their economical miracle ("Wirtschaftswunder"), thus returning to the standards of a western industrial society. Under the influence of a collective economical growth euphoria and an unbroken progression myth, to which big parts of the population were devoted to, the environmental consciousness was fairly nonexistent, either limited to mere nature preservation, or motivated by the rejection of dangerous technologies for military projects. But besides the criticism of atomic power of the ´Easter Marches´ ("Ostermarsch-Bewegung"), which was more oriented towards peace and opposition against re-arming, there was also a locally defined opposition against further construction of civil atomic plants. The rapid development and spread of environmental consciousness began in the Federal Republic of Germany at the beginning of the seventies. It had two main sources. The first being the social movements, encouraging transformation of growing local and sectorial resistance against the build up of the atomic industry into a general criticism of the prevailing technical-economical oriented narrow growth- and progression-perspectives. Already the first electoral victories of the Green party made the subject "environment" a political one and led the established parties to programmatic reactions. Secondly, the popularization of elaborate global resource-ecological models by the media, was taken up by the administration as a mandate to establish an environmental administration. This would bring the tasks together, that had until now been spread over different departments, to be worked on autonomously. The report of the "Club of Rome" in 1972 made widely known the problem of excessive exploitation and destruction of the existential basis of man. It also generated an important stimulus for a change of view of the relationship between man and nature. The idea of an ecological reorientation of economic practice was born, although it met with powerful resistance by the vested interests, even by the unions, who were concerned about the security of jobs and wages. The start and further development of the environmental movement took place in correlation with the so called "New Social Movements". Most important was the conflict with technological progress in the form of big atomic generation plants. It was based on various underlying motives. Initially the farmer’s and vine-grower’s own interests stirred their resistance, against the choice of location for atomic plants. Their concern was obviously about possible harvest and quality losses, e.g. through the emissions of the cooling towers. Yet background motive was also the rural population's fear of cultural foreignization ("Überfremdung") caused by the advance of big industry into the very context of their lives. The next motive evolved, when health hazards were pin-pointed as the central theme by large sections of society. For example radioactive low-radiation, emitted even during normal operation of atomic power plants and the aftereffects of possible accidents, elaborated by critical members of the scientific system and communicated to the citizen’s initiatives and action groups. The third motive was fear, that the future would be more and more in the hands of the monopolies. It activated those anti-capitalistic and antiauthoritarian groups, that had formed their attitude during the West-German student’s movement. The fourth motive was lack of trust in the scientific experts and representatives of the administration. It was caused by the technicized attitude and belief in progress, prevalent in science and politics, together with its alienation from ordinary understanding and every day conditions. In West-Germany the effects of higher educational standards, generated by the Social Democratic educational reform in 1968, ran along side a decreasing authoritarianism of the better educated social strata. Processes of detachment from handed down dependencies by the then young people of postwar society played another important part, as they induced a search for new identities and social behavior. These processes however, instead of being understood as modernization tendencies and as such integrated into the political arena, they were rejected and vehemently fought against by the established political system. This created a potential of vociferous social criticism, that can be understood as a sounding-board of things obviously gone wrong. The political-administrative system responded by barring a considerable part of the young intelligentsia from careers in civil service professions (by threatening or actually practicing exclusion). It was exactly these personnel, that were involved in the organization of extra-parliamentary, and at the time nonconformist amalgamations of young citizens. These groups spread into the bourgeois strata of society. The connection of the young protesting personnel with established but critical forces was characteristic of the early citizen’s initiatives. One could state, that this released considerable social energy and exposed the limitations of the citizen’s influence upon the parliamentary-representative system. As the political system dealt with these movements not in a political-argumentative, but rather in a power-political way, these movements were compelled to analyze the system's underlying interests critically. This not only lead to their realization of its objective contradictions, but also induced a new subjective identity, a modern, self-determined and autonomy striving individual.