Wilderness without borders?

Anyone who climbs the Siebensteinkopf, a 1,263-meter-high mountain in the Bavarian Forest, will immediately see that nature knows no boundaries here. The path up from the Reschbachklause winds through a young forest. Near the summit, a waist-high border stone, painted white, stands in the middle of the path, a D-B on one side, a C on the other. Here you are in Germany, over there is the Czech Republic. The exact course of the border is difficult to determine in the terrain, however; a narrow, clear-cut path disappears between the trees after a few meters. All around are thickets of young spruces, ferns, and blueberry bushes, the Bavarian ones indistinguishable from the Bohemian ones. This is a man-made border in the midst of a boundaryless wilderness.

The advertising materials and publications produced by the Bavarian Forest and Šumava National Parks, which jointly manage this area on the German-Czech border, confirm this impression. The forest is described as "wild and unbounded," a natural environment that forms one large whole. The narrative is omnipresent: Grenzenlos wild/Divočina bez hranic (wilderness without borders) is the name of a leaflet published by the two national parks, a joint exhibition, and even a wall calendar that is regularly issued by both park administrations. It is a description and an objective at the same time: the sense of unbounded nature that tourists already experience in the terrain is to be reflected at all levels of management and in how the land is cared for. For several years, the two bordering national parks have been cooperating more and more closely, with the aim of creating a space where nature can develop freely, irrespective of the political border. As efforts to establish a unified nature reserve gain ground, the national border appears little more than a tiresome obstacle to be overcome.

Geologically as well as ecologically, the Bavarian-Bohemian mountain range, which, until the middle of the 20th century, was called the Bohemian Forest (Böhmerwald) on both sides of the border, is indeed a single entity. Its forests merge seamlessly into one another and animals migrate from one side to the other undisturbed, including the flying bark beetles, which appear from time to time and appear to disregard the border entirely. Also culturally and linguistically, the area was united for centuries: although the state border ran right through it, a predominantly German-speaking population lived on both the Bavarian and Bohemian sides, maintaining common customs and traditions as well as contact with each other. However, this changed abruptly after 1945, when the expulsion of the "Germans" from and the forcible closure of the border divided what had historically been a permeable region for decades to come. Today, the state border between the Czech Republic and Germany also marks a language border. There is still an economic asymmetry between the two countries, more than thirty years after the dissolution of the Eastern Bloc. The border, which one looks for almost in vain in the forest today, was all too prominent until 1989: for forty years the Iron Curtain cut through the area and for the most part prevented any contact or exchange between the two sides. To this day, the political division has been reflected in nature conservation practices. Since their establishment, the two national parks have been managed according to different sets of criteria.
 
The history of the mountainous border region includes both aspects: unified ecology as well as political division. If we focus too heavily on the political border, we run the risk of ignoring the commonalities and the geographic and ecological coherence of the two "parts." At the same time, the slogan “wilderness without borders,” which takes no heed of the man-made border, is too simplistic. It ignores the formative significance that the state border had and still has for the area of the Bavarian Forest and Šumava. The history of nature conservation in the area is, to a large extent, also a history of the border: a history of overcoming and maintaining it, and of its changing shape, perception, and meaning. The following snapshots from the last one hundred years of cross-border nature conservation in the Bavarian Forest and Šumava show that the reality of the border played an important role for nature conservationists, precisely in the moments when they tried to overcome it.

The first cross-border contacts and transfers in the nature conservation of the Bohemian Forest revolved around the primeval Kubany Forest (Boubínský prales) in the Bohemian Šumava: a small area on the wooded slopes of Mountain, which, due to its inaccessibility, probably still contained original forests in the mid-19th century.1 In 1858, the noble landowner Johann Adolf II. Prince of Schwarzenberg declared that forestry would be discontinued in a 144-hectare section of this forest. In the following decades, the resulting reserve became a model for early nature conservation practices. When the modern discourse on nature conservation began to develop in Central Europe around 1900, Kubany was repeatedly cited in the Austrian debates – along with the famous American Yellowstone National Park – as a prime example of a nature reserve.2  Bohemian and Austrian conservationists (almost exclusively men at this time) praised the reserve as the first seedling from which further conservation initiatives would grow.3  Even though Kubany was located on the Bohemian side, its reputation extended far beyond the border. Before long, knowledge of the primeval forest reserve, which protected supposedly genuine "German nature," had spread among German conservation circles, and also helped to establish public perception of the Bohemian Forest as a natural wilderness worthy of protection. As late as 1969, the Bavarian Parliament's resolution on the establishment of the Bavarian Forest National Park still made reference to the "unique appeal of the Kubany Forest."4

Not all attempts at transboundary nature protection were founded on the principles of a peaceful transfer of ideas and conservation-based internationalism. During the interwar period, nature conservation was closely tied to the idea of the nation-state in both Germany and Czechoslovakia. In the case of Germany, imperial expansion was also added from the 1930s onward. At the end of 1938, Eugen Eichhorn, the Lower Bavarian commissioner for nature conservation, proposed a plan to establish a transboundary "Bohemian Forest National Park," a move that was primarily motivated by expansionist politics. The aim was to include parts of the recently annexed Czechoslovak area of the Bohemian Forest, thus obscuring the former Czechoslovak border.5  Although the project was ultimately not realized, it shows how closely the concerns of cross-border nature conservation were tied to the prevailing ideologies and the international situation of their time.

The political dependencies of transnational nature conservation also came to light during the first attempt to establish a truly bilateral national park in the Bavarian Forest and Šumava. In the second half of the 1960s, contact between German and Czechoslovak conservationists became more frequent and intensive. What the impermeable border between the "West" and the "Eastern Bloc" had made unthinkable in previous years was now made possible by an atmosphere of greater political openness in Czechoslovakia. At a nature conservation meeting in , West Bohemia, in 1967, Czech conservationists declared their intention to establish a bilateral national park in Šumava and to strengthen contacts with their Bavarian counterparts. There were similar efforts from the German side: the nature conservation officer of the government of Lower Bavaria, Hubert Weinzierl, advocated a cross-border national park project called "Intersilva".6  However, these efforts came to a standstill again due to changes in the political climate. After Soviet tanks forced the end of the Prague Spring in August 1968, the joint Czechoslovak-German plans for a cross-border national park also had to be put on hold. The national park was established in 1970, but only on the Bavarian side. Nevertheless, the short history of the Intersilva project marks not only the continuing importance of the political border, but also the firm conviction of Czech and German conservationists that both parts of the mountainous border region belonged together and should be protected jointly.

By 1991 the border finally seemed to have become obsolete. In March of that year, the Šumava National Park was established on the Czech side of the mountains. The Bavarian side immediately welcomed it as the long-awaited counterpart to the Bavarian Forest National Park. Seemingly effortlessly, cooperation between the two parks began, in line with the euphoric atmosphere of the early 1990s and the new opportunities for cooperation that opened up in Central Europe after the fall of the Iron Curtain. Conservationists on both sides forged joint projects and marked out cross-border nature trails. Soon, however, problems began to emerge, caused mainly by different ideas of nature conservation in the Czech Republic and Germany as well as the different position of the two parks within the political and social context of the two countries. Since the 1980s, the Bavarian Forest has been managed as a developing wilderness and there have been ongoing initiatives to protect the area’s natural processes, while Šumava has been repeatedly described as a historic cultural landscape and managed as such. In addition, Šumava is of central importance in the context of the nature conservation debate in the Czech Republic and the area acts as a proxy for the country’s environmental conflicts. This role cannot be compared even with the prominent position of the Bavarian Forest as Germany’s first national park. The fact that both parks were separated by a state border thus continued to play a role that should not be underestimated when considering their cooperation and joint nature conservation work.

Today, thirty years later, the Bavarian Forest and Šumava may seem boundless and wild. The forests, the moors, and the wildlife of the two national parks are hardly distinguishable from each other. The border stone in the middle of the forest, however, remains: the border and the attempts to overcome it have played – and still play – an enormously important role in the story of nature conservation in this German-Czech border region.

English translation: William Connor