When forests become utopias
by Theresa Steigleder
Stream from the mobile-stage of the lcb, Berlin, 2033.
“If things go on like this,” wrote ‘der Spiegel’ in 1983, “in twenty years the ‘German forest’ will be a thing of the past.” What is left, 50 years later, and what this “German forest” has actually become, wonders author Theresa Steigleder, who achieved fame two years ago through her new edition of the Rennsteiglied.
An optimistic eulogy.
When I was born, I grew up in a landscape surrounded by mountains and forests. For a long time it seemed natural to me to be surrounded by forest. The forest was left and right and straight ahead. It was in forest roads and forest baths and forest pharmacies. It was everywhere around me, was in me and I was in it. The forest became a big part of my identity.
Our identity.
I grew up in the Vessertal Biosphere Reserve in a cozy little village called Schmiedefeld on the Rennsteig. We all had one thing in common: we spent a large part of our childhood in the forest. We played with sticks and branches, climbed trees or built something out of old wood. The surrounding forests were the setting for countless adventures and wild fantasies. We lived our lives with these trees. We fought between them, made love on them, celebrated and dreamed among them.
Our stories branched out, our memories took root, and the older we got, the older and bigger the trees became. The spruces that my mother had planted in her school days soon outgrew my head. For me, the Thuringian forests became an army of giants that would outlast us all. I believed in the forest as a constant, evergreen and yet always growing.
However, when the first big storm hit in the winter of 2007, I experienced for the first time the fragility of my imagined self-evident facts. With winds of over 170 kilometers per hour Kyrill raged between our peaks, destroying several thousand hectares of forest. Because we didn’t know any better at the time, we called it “the storm of the century.” There was a story that “a whole mountain disappeared” in Ilmenau. But what was actually meant was not the mountain, but its forest. A forest, through which Goethe had already hiked, had collapsed within one night.
That was the first time that I felt this certain form of sadness in me, which I feel even more today and which I still find difficult to describe. It’s a kind of world-weariness. A break in identity thinking that makes the suffering something collective. But it is different from wars or human-caused disasters. It goes beyond the human, it is more elementary. It is not only we who mourn. Everything mourns. Every animal, every plant, every fungus. Every life, which, even without our clever definitions of life, is alive.
With collective pain comes a collective willingness to help. And so already in spring 2007 the Ilmenau Lindenberg was replanted by many people. With copper beeches, sycamore maple, Douglas fir and silver fir, our mountain should now become more colorful. But also nature gifted this place young spruces, birches and rowan trees – as the descendants of those who had fallen.
Today, the Lindenberg is a green ray of hope in the midst of the deceased Thuringian forests. But other places, too, I have been able to get to know various forms of survival in recent years. Let’s take a trip to the forests that still exist. Close your eyes and come with me to the countryside in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. We’ll drive on roads that stretch for miles straight ahead of us. The wings of the wind turbines flutter toward the clouds and mechanically surrender to their cycle. To the left out the window we see yellow blossoms stretching to the horizon. On the right, still green, the wheat grows to the edge of the forest.
The sign at the entrance to a village reads: Neu Plötz.
People have not lived here for a long time. Nature was allowed to move in free of charge and without bureaucracy. In 2023, NABU began researching renaturation processes there and allowed the forest to grow into the houses. In the last ten years, Neu Plötz has developed into a center of ecological diversity. And it has done so in the middle of the economic landscape of Pomerania. This small village alone is home to three different species of wild bees, rare butterflies and even rosebugs. Many birds nest there and bats roost in the old walls. For me, the project “Neu Plötz lebt!” is a prime example of how the so-called “nature” can manage without us.
Albert Einstein once said, “The purest form of insanity is to leave everything as it is and at the same time hope that something will change.” I think that may apply to dirty dishes, but not to our natural world. In my opinion, the best thing we can do right now is to do nothing. That’s why, in my new Rennsteig song, the forest calls out to all of us: “So leave me alone!”
I know that opinions are still divided on this issue. And so, of course, there are forests that function very well with human intervention. So let’s fly mentally and in bird’s eye view further into the Thuringian Basin. There, where during the drought of the last years the fields burned again and again, a square mountain forest immediately catches the eye. It is Nico Frischbier’s so-called checkerboard forest near Heldrungen. Because Frischbier calls his oriental beech and Turkish firs trees of the future, some of the leaflets referred to it as a “migrant forest”. In fact, the project was already showing great success as early as the mid-twenties. Not only did the newcomers from Turkey and other oriental countries feel very much at home here. They also got along quite well with the locals. Lebanon cedars, Turkish firs, oriental beeches, silver limes and Hemlock firs made friends with the resident oaks, spruces and beeches.
Who found the beauty already decades ago in the everlasting of the Thuringian forests, should also find it easy to recognize the beauty in the diversity. When the second World War II was over, after a large-scale bark beetle infestation, only monocultures were planted. In rank and file. “Easy to process and easy to maintain” was the motto for pines and spruces. Originally, German forests consisted mainly of silver firs, rowan and copper beech. Ten years ago, however, more than 90% of the forests were still in commercial ownership. There, by the way, it is not called forest, but forestry. And it was not about a metaphorical green heart, but about actual green bills. Although already in the 80s, a new eco-program was distributed nationwide on glossy paper, in which the environmental protection (and “most urgently” the fight against the dying of the forests) as the peacekeeping to the “most important task of mankind”, a rethinking took place only in the last two decades. When the Spiegel wrote in 1983 that twenty years later there was no longer any question of the German forest, perhaps he was referring to the forestry industry. I am glad that in the last ten years there has also been an increase in the economic awareness that the forest is more than just wood. Nevertheless, the German forest is becoming more and more of a great utopia made up of several small stories. They are about what the forest could become one day. But those who tell the tales will not live to see the future that is told. That’s how it is, that’s how it was and so it will always be.
Ten years ago, we created the utopia that we could become Co2-neutral by today. We wanted to expand bike paths, public transportation, and our power grid. We wanted to charge our cars with wind power. We wanted to save our resources, share our food and cut out the unnecessary. But if we’re honest, we just wanted to continue to be better, faster or bigger. We did a lot, but made little impact. We adorned our products with seals of approval and our conscience with intentions. And what we couldn’t do with deeds we made up for with resentment.
We learned painfully that there can be no personal responsibility when the so-called “guilt” hangs around like hot coals. But we are also learning what we can accomplish together if we think of ourselves as a whole. And not only as humanity, but with everything that surrounds us and keeps us alive. Even a forest is not made up of individual trees. The forest is a network. It has always done better than we do at working together, creating symbioses and adapting. And so the bare, dried-up dust deserts that are left over from the forest of my childhood have become a memorial to me. They remind me to acknowledge fundamental flaws in human systems and therefore not to take them too seriously anymore.
Also this abandonment we are experiencing right now would not have been felt at all if there had not been an imagined system for it before. We are just failing human ideas and I hope that we will become more and more aware of this in the near future. I do not know what our forests will become in the next few years.
After all, I am just a writing forest child who theatrically mourns our forest and ponders about utopias. But I firmly believe in the words of the great Jeff Goldblum, who, as Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park, said, “Life always finds a way.”