Exploiting the Urwald: German Post-Colonial Forestry in Poland and Central Africa, 1900--1960 (2012)
In modern discourse the `primeval forest' evokes a landscape undisturbed by humans, a remnant of the prehistoric past where diverse plant and animal species coexist, where nature persists as it once was. When modern environmentalists refer to the concept, it is often as a call to arms to intervene and protect threatened biodiversity from intruders, usually loggers, peasants, ranchers or hunters.1 However, at the beginning of the twentieth century the `primeval forest' meant something different: an undeveloped and uneconomic landscape inhabited by poor, primitive, often illiterate, people who needed the firm hand of the state and Western science to bring them civilization and modernity. For German foresters and timber industrialists, primeval forests, or Urwälder, were undeveloped, disorderly and remote regions dominated by deciduous hardwood trees with little market value. Usually associated with the eastern European peripheries under German and Austro-Hungarian rule, by the turn of the twentieth century the Urwald problem was extended to Africa, especially to the German colony of Cameroon abutting the Central African rainforest. On the eve of the First World War German foresters advanced a sweeping plan to solve the twin colonial problems of underdevelopment and backwardness in the Urwälder of Cameroon. Interrupted by the outbreak of war, the Cameroon Urwald plan was instead applied to Bia owie a forest in German-occupied Poland, known widely as `Europe's last Urwald'.
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