https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7782-9288
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ABSTRACT
In this article, Forchtner investigates the construction of an ‘ideal’, extreme-right, ecologically sensitive subject. A concern for the natural environment is in no way new to the extreme right, and has long been part of its ideological make-up. In particular, claims that the laws of nature are applicable to the social world and that a community is embedded in an ecosystem have long been features of a right-wing ecological imaginary. Through an analysis of all the articles on a paradigmatic ecological issue, biodiversity, published in Germany’s exemplary extreme-right magazine preoccupied with ecology, Umwelt & Aktiv (Environment & Active), this cultural imaginary is reconstructed. Included in it as key themes are human responsibility for environmental degradation, the ecological value of flora and fauna, and criticism of modernity’s levelling tendencies (both biologically and culturally). Taking responsibility for the community’s Heimat (homeland) is, consequently, a crucial element for this subject: a subject who aims for purity, order and the stability of ecosystems.
ORCID
Bernhard Forchtner http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7782-9288
Notes
1 The notion of an imaginary signifies the imagined symbolic integration of the social, how humans imagine their collective life should be. For more details, see the introduction to this special issue; see also Bernhard Forchtner and Christoffer Kølvraa, ‘Extreme right images of radical authenticity: multimodal aesthetics of history, nature, and gender roles in social media’, European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology, vol. 4, no. 3, 2017, 252–81.
2 For an overview of the NPD’s environmental concerns, see Madeleine Hurd and Steffen Werther, ‘The militant media of neo-Nazi environmentalism’, in Heike Graf (ed.), The Environment in the Age of the Internet: Activists, Communication and the Digital Landscape (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers 2016), 139–70; on extreme-right organic farmers, see Raimon Klein, ‘Biomilch vom braunen Hof’, in oekom e.V. (ed.), Ökologie von rechts: Braune Umweltschützer auf Stimmenfang (Munich: oekom 2012), 60–4. Of these two magazines, only Umwelt & Aktiv has achieved lasting success; as well as the present article, see also Hurd and Werther, ‘The militant media of neo-Nazi environmentalism’, 149–54; and Andreas Speit, ‘Grüne Brauen: Seit sieben Jahren erscheint “Umwelt & Aktiv”: Das Ökomagazin der extremen Rechten’, in Heinrich Gudrun, Klaus-Dieter Kaiser and Norbert Wiersbinski (eds), Naturschutz und Rechtsradikalismus: Gegenwärtige Entwicklungen, Probleme Abgrenzungen und Steuerungsmöglichkeiten, Bfn-Skripten 394 (Bonn: Bundesamt für Naturschutz 2015), 118–22.
3 Jonathan Olsen, Nature and Nationalism: Right-Wing Ecology and the Politics of Identity in Contemporary Germany (New York: St Martin’s Press 1999), 35–9.
4 Elie Kedourie, Nationalism (London: Hutchinson 1966), 57.
5 Iñaki Barcena, Pedro Ibarra and Mario Zubiaga, ‘The evolution of the relationship between ecologism and nationalism’, in Michael Redclift and Graham Woodgate (eds), The International Handbook of Environmental Sociology (Cheltenham, Glos and Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar 1997), 300–15 (302).
6 Anthony D. Smith, National Identity (Reno and Las Vegas: University of Nevada Press 1991), 9.
7 Catherine Palmer, ‘From theory to practice: experiencing the nation in everyday life’, Journal of Material Culture, vol. 3, no. 2, 1998, 175–99 (191).
8 Kenneth Olwig, ‘Natives and aliens in the national landscape’, Landscape Research, vol. 28, no. 1, 2003, 61–74 (61).
9 For arguments along these lines, though not dealing with the extreme right, see, for example, Banu Subramaniam, ‘The aliens have landed! Reflections on the rhetoric of biological invasions’, Meridians, vol. 2, no. 1, 2001, 26–40. For a contribution to the German debate, see Reinhard Piechocki, Konrad Ott, Thomas Potthast and Norbert Wiersbinski (eds), Vilmer Thesen zu Grundsatzfragen des Naturschutzes, BfN-Skripten 281 (Bonn: Bundesamt für Naturschutz 2010).
10 ‘Das Magazin für ganzheitliches Denken: Umweltschutz, Tierschutz, Heimatschutz’. All translations from the German, unless otherwise stated, are by the author.
11 See, for example, ‘“Kulturlandschaft”—“Deutscher Honig”—“Blut und Boden”: Das Problem der Massenmedien mit dem Heimatschutz’, Umwelt & Aktiv, no. 2, 2012, 33–4.
12 Karl Richter, ‘“Umweltschutz fängt bei der Heimat an!” Die DS im Gespräch mit Laura Horn, der leitende Redakteurin des Natur- und Umweltschutzmagazins, Umwelt & Aktiv’, Deutsche Stimme, January 2009.
13 Jan Nowak, ‘Von (r)echten Ökos aus Niederbayern: Ein Portrait des Magazins “Umwelt & Aktiv” und seines neonazistischen Umfeldes’, lichtung: ostbayrisches magazin, no. 3, 2009, 12–15; Speit, ‘Grüne Brauen’.
14 Willibald I. Holzer, ‘Rechtsextremismus—Konturen, Definitionsmerkmale und Erklärungsansätze’, in Dokumentationsarchiv des österreichischen Widerstands (ed.), Handbuch des österreichischen Rechtsextremismus: Aktualisierte und erweiterte Neuausgabe, 2nd edn (Vienna: Deuticke 1994), 12–96. As these aspects will be more or less present, I view them as constituting a continuum, ranging from today’s almost mainstream radical-right ‘populists’ to neo-Nazis.
15 The following draws partly on Bernhard Forchtner, Andreas Kroneder and David Wetzel, ‘Being skeptical? Exploring far-right climate-change communication in Germany’, Environmental Communication, vol. 12, no. 5, 2018, 589–604.
16 Ernst Moritz Arndt, ‘Ein Wort über die Pflegung und Erhaltung der Forsten und der Bauern im Sinne einer höheren, d.h. menschlichen Gesetzgebung’, in Der Wächter, eine Zeitschrift, in zwanglosen Heften, vol. 2 (Cologne: Heinrich Rommerskirchen 1815), 346–408 (401f.).
17 Olsen, Nature and Nationalism, 68.
18 Ernst Rudorff, Heimatschutz (St Goar: Reichl 1994), 76–7.
19 Ulrich Linse, ‘“Fundamentalistischer” Heimatschutz: Die “Naturphilosophie” Reinhard Falters’, in Uwe Puschner and G. Ulrich Großmann (eds), Völkisch und national: Zur Aktualität alter Denkmuster im 21. Jahrhundert (Darmstadt: WBG 2009), 156–78 (158).
20 Franz-Josef Brüggemeier, Mark Cioc and Thomas Zeller, ‘Introduction’, in Franz-Josef Brüggemeier, Mark Cioc and Thomas Zeller (eds), How Green Were the Nazis? Nature, Environment, and Nation in the Third Reich (Athens: Ohio University Press 2005), 1–17 (8); see also Frank Uekötter, The Green and the Brown: A History of Conservation in Nazi Germany (New York: Cambridge University Press 2006).
21 Anna Bramwell, Blood and Soil: Richard Walther Darré and Hitler’s ‘Green Party’ (Bourne End, Bucks: Kensal Press 1985). Critics include Gesine Gerhard, ‘Breeding pigs and people for the Third Reich: Richard Walther Darré’s agrarian ideology’, in Brüggemeier, Cioc and Zeller (eds), How Green Were the Nazis?, 129–46. The fact that the natural environment is not only relevant in historical National Socialism and the German extreme right is evident in, for example, the British case; see John E. Richardson, British Fascism: A Discourse-Historical Analysis (Stuttgart: ibidem 2017), 163–73; and Philip M. Coupland, Farming, Fascism and Ecology: A Life of Jorian Jenks (London and New York: Routledge 2017). For a range of case studies, including more on the German case, see Bernhard Forchtner (ed.), The Far Right and the Environment: Politics, Discourse and Communication (forthcoming Routledge 2019).
22 Thomas Zeller, ‘Molding the landscape of Nazi environmentalism: Alwin Seifert and the Third Reich’, in Brüggemeier, Cioc and Zeller (eds), How Green Were the Nazis?, 147–70.
23 Thomas M. Lekan, The Nation in Nature: Landscape Preservation and German Identity 1885–1945 (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press 2004), 168.
24 David Blackbourn, The Conquest of Nature: Water, Landscape, and the Making of Modern Germany (London: Vintage 2006), 266–80; Lekan, The Nation in Nature, 204–51; Uekötter, The Green and the Brown, 30–43.
25 Joachim Radkau and Frank Uekötter (eds), Naturschutz und Nationalsozialismus (Frankfurt am Main and New York: Campus 2003); Nils M. Franke and Uwe Pfenning (eds), Kontinuitäten im Naturschutz (Baden-Baden: Nomos 2014); Olsen, Nature and Nationalism.
26 Joachim Radkau, The Age of Ecology: A Global History, trans. from the German by Patrick Camiller (Cambridge: Polity Press 2014). Extreme-right ecology between the 1970s and early 1990s is relatively well documented; see Oliver Geden, Rechte Ökologie: Umweltschutz zwischen Emanzipation und Faschismus (Berlin: Elefanten Press 1996); Thomas Jahn and Peter Wehling, Ökologie von rechts: Nationalismus und Umweltschutz bei der Neuen Rechten und den ‘Republikanern’ (Frankfurt am Main: Campus 1991); Janet Biehl and Peter Staudenmaier, Ecofacism Revisited: Lessons from the German Experience [1995] (Porsgrunn: New Compass Press 2011); and Olsen, Nature and Nationalism.
27 ‘Grundgesetzlicher Grundwert—‘Deutsches Volk’: Heidelberger Manifest vom 17. Juni 1981’ (first version), available in facsimile on the anti-fascist website apabiz.de at www.apabiz.de/archiv/material/Profile/Heidelberger%20Kreis.htm (viewed 10 April 2019).
28 See oekom e.V. (ed.), Ökologie von rechts; Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung (ed.), Braune Ökologen: Hintergründe und Strukturen am Beispiel Mecklenburg-Vorpommerns (Rostock: HBS 2012); and Gudrun, Kaiser and Wiersbinski (eds), Naturschutz und Rechtsradikalismus.
29 Hurd and Werther, ‘The militant media of neo-Nazi environmentalism’, 164.
30 Emily Turner-Graham, ‘“An intact environment is our foundation of life”: the Junge Nationaldemokraten, the Ring Freiheitlicher Jugend and the cyber-construction of nationalist landscapes’, in Andrea Mammone, Emanuel Godin and Brian Jenkins (eds), Varieties of Right-Wing Extremism in Europe (London and New York: Routledge 2013), 233–49.
31 Teun A. van Dijk, ‘The interdisciplinary study of news as discourse’, in Klaus Bruhn-Jensen and Nicholas W. Jankowksi (eds), Handbook of Qualitative Methods in Mass Communication Research (London and New York: Routledge 1991), 108–20 (113).
32 Laura Horn, ‘Der Hirschkäfer’, Umwelt & Aktiv, no. 2, 2012, 23.
33 ‘Der Wildapfel’, Umwelt & Aktiv, no. 4, 2012, 6.
34 See, for example, Bernd Sommer, ‘Anti-capitalism in the name of ethno-nationalism: ideological shifts on the German extreme right’, Patterns of Prejudice, vol. 42, no. 3, 2008, 305–16.
35 Georg Ritzer, The McDonaldization of Society (Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press 1993).
36 Laura Horn, ‘Die Große Kapuzinerkresse’, Umwelt & Aktiv, no. 1, 2013, 26–7 (26).
37 Christoph Hofer, ‘Vorwort’, Umwelt & Aktiv, no. 1, 2007, 3. This foreword is not part of the systematically compiled corpus of texts on which other claims in this article are based. Similarly, another article in this issue, not primarily concerned with biodiversity, reproduces a section of the NPD’s party programme: ‘German landscapes are cultural landscapes. Therefore, environmental protection can inherently not be separated from cultural development’: ‘Eine intakte Natur ist die Grundlage unserer Zukunft’, Umwelt & Aktiv, no. 1, 2007, 19–20 (19); NPD, Arbeit. Familie. Vaterland: Das Parteiprogramm der Nationaldemokratischen Partei Deutschlands (NPD) (Berlin: NPD 2010), 15.
38 C. H., ‘Alte Haustierrassen’, Umwelt & Aktiv, no. 4, 2007, 22–3 (22).
39 Dankwart Mireille, ‘“Das Geheimnis des Bienensterbens: Eine Dokumentation von Mark Daniels”’, Umwelt & Aktiv, no. 3, 2012, 8–11 (8f.).
40 Ibid., 10.
41 Ibid., 11.
42 Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London and New York: Routledge 2002). Olsen, Nature and Nationalism, 34f., following Douglas, understands the fear of pollution as being the Other to the desire for belonging, and that right-wing fears of collective pollution revolve around lack of cohesion.
43 Douglas, Purity and Danger, 2.
44 Ibid., 140.
45 For an influential example of the ethnopluralist case for the ‘right to difference’, see Alain de Benoist and Charles Champetier, ‘The French New Right in the year 2000’, available online at http://home.alphalink.com.au/~radnat/debenoist/alain9.html (viewed 11 April 2019). For early assessments, see Pierre-André Taguieff, ‘The new cultural racism in France’, Telos, no. 83, 1990, 109–22; and Étienne Balibar, ‘Is there a “neo-racism”?’, in Étienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein (eds), Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, Balibar trans. from the French by Chris Turner (London and New York: Verso 1991), 17–28.
46 For a comprehensive discussion of the concept of ‘invasive’ species, see, for example, Subramaniam, ‘The aliens have landed!’; and Mark Woods and Paul Veatch Moriarty, ‘Strangers in a strange land: the problem of exotic species’, Environmental Values, vol. 10, no. 2, 2001, 163–91. See also Nils M. Franke, ‘Gegen das Fremde, nicht nur im Garten: Die Neobiota-Diskussion als Einfallstor für Rechtsextreme’, in oekom e.V. (ed.), Ökologie von rechts, 78–84.
47 Subramaniam, ‘The aliens have landed!’.
48 Laura Horn, ‘Fremde in unserem Land: Von Neophyten und Neozoen’, Umwelt & Aktiv, no. 1, 2009, 20–2 (20).
49 Laura Horn, ‘Marienkäfer: Vom Glück und Unglück der Krabbeltiere’, Umwelt & Aktiv, no. 2, 2011, 29–30; Laura Horn, ‘Neue Gefahren für unsere Bienen: Die Asiatische Hornisse und andere eingeschleppte Schädlinge’, Umwelt & Aktiv, no. 3, 2015, 28–9; Laura Horn, ‘Kampf ums Eichhörnchen’, Umwelt & Aktiv, no. 3, 2012, 25–6. The red squirrel has not only been a prominent symbol of alien invasion in Germany but also in the United Kingdom, for example, where it appeared in the British National Party’s literature. See Bernhard Forchtner, ‘Longing for communal purity: countryside, (far-right) nationalism and the (im)possibility of progressive politics of nostalgia’, in Christian Karner and Bernhard Weicht (eds), The Commonalities of Global Crises: Markets, Communities and Nostalgia (Basingstoke: Palgrave 2016), 271–95.
50 See, for example, Horn, ‘Fremde in unserem Land’, 20–1; and B. A. H., ‘Tierische Einwanderer’, Umwelt & Aktiv, no. 4, 2010, 18.
51 C. H., ‘Die europäische Ameise im Überlebenskampf’, Umwelt & Aktiv, no. 3, 2014, 28–9 (28).
52 Angelika Willig, ‘Von Springkräutern, Waschbären, Dinosauriern und Flüchtlingen: Invasive Arten, und ob sie auf die Politik übertragbar sind’, Umwelt & Aktiv, no. 4, 2015, 21–2 (21).
53 Horn, ‘Fremde in unserem Land’, 22.
54 David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Cambridge, MA and Oxford: Blackwell 1991).
55 In general terms, ecological restoration has also been criticized by some not only for further blurring the line between nature and culture, but also for its implicit nativism. See William O’Brien, ‘Exotic invasions, nativism, and ecological restoration: on the persistence of a contentious debate’, Ethics, Place & Environment, vol. 9, no. 1, 2006, 63–77.
56 Laura Horn, ‘Zurück in den Sümpfen’, Umwelt & Aktiv, no. 2, 2012, 22–3 (23).
57 Wolfram Bednarski, ‘Rückkehr des Wolfes—ein Geschenk und eine zweite Chance’, Umwelt & Aktiv, no. 4, 2014, 32–3 (33).
58 Douglas, Purity and Danger, 50.
59 Differences exist, for example, concerning climate change. For analyses of this and other environmental issues, see Forchtner (ed.), The Far-Right and the Environment.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Bernhard Forchtner
Bernhard Forchtner is a lecturer in the School of Media, Communication and Sociology at the University of Leicester, and has previously worked as a Marie Curie Fellow at the Institute of Social Sciences at the Humboldt University in Berlin, where he conducted a project on far-right discourses on the environment (project number 327595). His recent publications include ‘Being skeptical? Exploring far-right climate-change communication in Germany’ (with Andreas Kroneder and David Wetzel in Environmental Communication, 2018) and The Routledge Handbook on Language and Politics (with Ruth Wodak, 2017). Email: [email protected].