German Landscapes

Heligoland and the Lange Anna, the Lüneburg Heath, Heidelberg and the Neckar Valley, Lake Starnberg, the Wetterstein mountains—German landscapes are as diverse as they are extraordinary and distinctive. The well-known landscape historian and ecologist Hansjörg Küster goes on a journey of discovery and introduces the reader to the loveliest German landscapes. On the way, many hard to find and even hidden features are revealed along with those that are readily apparent. This book is about much more than geography. Landscapes are more than that, they have a variety of cultural meanings, no precisely fixed borders, they can be small or large, spectacular or “totally normal.” Our gaze falls upon the wide North Sea, the high Black Forest, and the Kaiserstuhl (Emperor’s Chair), which in spite of its name is just a hill country area. The journey takes us into the Bavarian Forest with Friedrich Nietzsche and to Heligoland with James Krüss. It also shows us that Karl May most likely had the deeply cut valleys of the Elbsandstein mountain in mind when he described the canyons of the American West in his famous novels about the Wild West. Hansjörg Küster is a professor of plant ecology at the Institute for Geobotany at the Leibniz University of Hannover. C.H.Beck has published many of his other works, including Die Entdeckung der Landschaft. Einführung in eine neue Wissenschaft (The Discovery of Landscape. Introduction to a New Science, 2012), Am Anfang war das Korn. Eine andere Geschichte der Menschheit (In the Beginning There Was Corn. A Different History of the Human Race, 2013).