| dc.description.abstract | With Nazi Germany’s unconditional surrender in May 1945, the Allied powers assumed sovereignty over Germany, but this was not absolute sovereignty as the authority of the occupiers coexisted, overlapped, and competed with Germans’ own legitimacy. Using the concept of sovereignty regimes, a term that acknowledges that sovereignty can and does coexist on different levels of authority, this dissertation focuses on the environment and issues of land management to explore the interactions among the different sovereign regimes of the occupation, including democratically elected German governments, the Stuttgart Länderrat, the Bizonal Administration, the Military Government, the Allied High Commission, and the West German government. To investigate the German challenges and assertions of sovereignty, “Occupying Nature” examines forestry, hunting, and agriculture in American-occupied Bavaria from 1945 to 1955 and argues that environmental and land management issues provided a space where Germans could and did assert sovereignty long before they held any real power. The environment proved to be a site where the German people could contest the occupation because American occupiers did not consider the environment particularly political and because occupation policies significantly affected the environment and disregarded the Germans’ own ideas, laws, and traditions concerning land use and land management. Witnessing these interventions, German politicians and civil society associations drew on German law, international law, conservation practices, and cultural traditions to contest the sovereignty of the occupiers and to demand that the Germans control and oversee German land and natural resources.
By engaging and challenging the occupiers over questions of land use, natural resources, and food production, the German people actively participated in the renewal of German political culture. In their efforts to mitigate American policies, the Germans revived and expanded numerous civil society associations that then pressed the German authorities, state governments, and the occupiers themselves to alter the policies of the occupiers. To challenge the sovereignty and policies of the occupiers, Germans reframed pre-war laws and traditions within the democratic rhetoric used by the occupiers. In this way, Germans not only sought to demonstrate the democratic nature of their laws and traditions, but they also reoriented German society and laws towards a more democratic basis, a practice that contributed to the recivilization of German society. | en |
