Environmental Disasters and Place-Based Identity Formation: The Windstorm of 1870 and the 150-Year Czech Relationship with the Bohemian Forest

How do cultural perceptions of historic environmental disasters influence our present understanding of natural processes and conservation? How do such events contribute to the identity of a place? This analysis of the representations of the 1868 and 1870 windstorms – and the subsequent bark beetle outbreak – in the Bohemian Forest (Šumava/Böhmerwald) on the border of Bohemia, between what is today the Czech Republic and Germany, in the mass media and belles-lettres of the time, demonstrates how fundamental such events can be to the development of place-based identity. In this article, we will show that nature conservation and a particular type of landscape management are conditioned by how they are historically interpreted and represented rather than by factors of nature. The 1868 and 1870 windstorms have become an integral part of the emotional narrative of the local forests’ apocalyptic collapse and the disappearance of the Bohemian Forest’s pristine nature. This catastrophic story has long stimulated tourists’ interest in the region and has been, at the same time, an instrument for the political aspirations of Czech nationalists. Although contemporary natural history research has conclusively proven that the windstorms of the late 1860s and early 1870s are only a few of many such historical environmental disasters in the Bohemian Forest, these tendencies persist today. The further analysis of journalistic articles from 1991 to 2010 has shown how this narrative still creates an identity of place and influences debates about the relationship between regional development and nature conservation in Bohemia Forest National Park. This article was published open access under a CC BY 4.0 licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ .