The Building of Socialist style Land Management in East Germany
This is a map of East Germany, dated April 1984, found at a Soviet Archive trash sale in Moscow. It is likely that the map dates from the 1970s and was just reprinted in 1984, as this map is often cited in works about the history of environmentalism and is referenced from earlier dates. The cartography is by Hermann Haack at Gotha (the one big name associated with maps in East Germany), and the map is entitled "Building Socialist Land Use in ‘East Germany’". My translations may need some work because my German is not great, especially this DDR government language which is insanely bureaucratic and wordy to me. "Landeskultur" can be translated as something like "Land Management" or "Land Use".
The main thrust of this map was to show that the government was using every last bit of territory in order to build a socialist paradise, and, to show that any environmental screw ups that people are upset about will be fixed in the future so they shouldn’t be upset about them. I havent studied the history of East Germany in detail, but I might gather from this map that in the 1970s many people there were upset about the state of the environment after the big Stalin-style industrial projects, and large-scale strip mining from earlier decades.
The map makes a point, on the lower right, to show natural reserves and conservation areas. Many of the areas shown as being for natural preservation on the right are overlapped by the map immediately to the left, which shows them as being slated for industrial use.
Image by jczart
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