A Silence Made up of Sounds: Early Twentieth-Century German Soundscapes of Conservation

Alps and the heaths -where institutions that may be compared with modern national parks were established in the period under examination, I provide an analysis of how these symbolically charged national landscapes were also represented as nationally relevant soundscapes.I then move to the forest before finally investigating the sonic dimension of areas determined worthy of protection on the seaside, as a way to provide a more complete representation of the relationship of the German conservation movement with a great variety of local soundscapes. Sound in ConservationNot all early German conservationists experienced natural sounds in the same way.Some, for instance, foregrounded how the appreciation of soundscapes demanded different skills and sensibilities than that of visual landscapes.Konrad Guenther, a zoology professor, provided crucial insight into this issue.He stated that while the visual aesthetics of a landscape are easily perceived by anyone, knowledge is central to fully appreciating a soundscape (Guenther 6-7).This suggests that a certain amount of effort, dedication, and training was necessary for a full enjoyment of nature's sounds.The songs of birds, for example, express their true meaning only to those who have studied them, Guenther argues.Their "concert" (10) hides outstanding or rare singers from the untrained ear.He even claims that poets, with very few exceptions, lack knowledge about "living nature": "They let the birds sing, but are unable to identify which ones" (Guenther 10). 1 Knowledge, however, was not universally considered the sole or even a necessary element for appreciating the sounds of nature.Hans Walther Frickhinger, another zoologist, argued in 1924 that the significance of birds in shaping the acoustic environment was self-evident.He maintained that one need not be an ornithologist to appreciate the beauty of birdsong, even if some nuances might be lost on the untrained ear (Frickhinger).In line with this less detail-oriented approach, the sounds of nature were frequently portrayed in broad strokes, simply as a counterpoint to the noise of industrial and urban modernity.In this context, paradoxically, the sounds of nature came to be equated with silence (Novak and Sakakeeny 129).However, this was a silence made up of sounds.As famously highlighted in the 1960s by Rachel Carson, and earlier by others including some of my sources, absolute silence would, in fact, indicate a dead ecosystem (Carson; "Das Schweigen im Walde" ("The Silence in the Forest")).Interestingly, even the natural sounds of non-living features, such as waterfalls, reinforced the perception of nature's silence rather than disrupting it (Corbin 48).This idea found practical application in conservation efforts of the time.For instance, during a 1942 discussion among various German state officers about nature conservation in the Alps, its wartime limitations, and post-war perspectives, the case was made for the necessity to preserve a certain waterfall.The argument asserted that "water is the voice of the landscape," encapsulating the idea that these natural sounds, while perceived as part of nature's "silence", were crucial to the landscape's identity and value (Buchsttter 12). 2At the turn of the twentieth century, German conservationists appeared to be operating within a dichotomous framework, mirroring a perspective widely adopted in Europe at the time.They, thus, drew sharp distinctions between the human realm and the natural world (Sprenger et al.).In their perception, the only true disruptors of both nature's silence and its innate voice were the sounds emanating from human activities and technologies.This perspective can be understood through modern sound ecology terminology: geophony (sounds from non-biological sources) and biophony (sounds from non-human biological sources) were considered constituent elements of nature's