Chapter 1 - Balancing Economy and Ecology: Building toward Environmental Protection, 1945–1970

Summary

Chapter one investigates how the SED used nature conservation and environmental protection to strengthen its socialist state, domestically and internationally. The chapter traces communist economic and nature conservation practices after the Second World War and the problems they generated. The GDR claimed science and technology would forge a rational, technocratic future that both employed and protected nature in the service of socialism and the East Germans. This chapter situates the SED’s actions in the context of an environmental awareness emerging on both sides of the Iron Curtain in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The SED harnessed the popular topic of the environment to leverage its position at a moment when questions about consumption and the future gripped leaders and citizens around the world. The GDR merged German traditions and Soviet-style communism in an attempt to balance the needs of the economy with a deepening commitment to environment protection.