Date of Award

Spring 2026

Document Type

M.A. Essay

First Advisor

Nancy Canepa

Second Advisor

Melissa Zeiger

Abstract

Arguing that the rich symbolic associations of trees become a medium to synthesize shared identity during a country’s formative moments, this paper theorizes the image of the forest as a site of national memory. By tracking representations of the natural landscape during nation-building to representations that attempt to recover and reclaim dignity postwar, this paper lays bare the potential of the national symbol to transform as history progresses. The paper’s author reads three genres–fairy tales, a novel, and a work of public art–from three authors–the Brothers Grimm, Italo Calvino, and Joseph Beuys–across time to interrogate the role of the forest in the development (and maintenance) of a nation’s collective memory. Starting with the Grimms’ vision of the forest as an organic realm of unpolluted cultural values that set the stage for the German nation, the essay argues that works by Calvino and Beuys expand the power of the forest symbol to accommodate its function as a tool to reconcile a fragmented sense of national and cultural identity in the years following fascism and during the intensification of industrialization in Germany and Italy. Shifting conditions within the nation make for shifting conditions within natural landscapes, and this comparison deepens and complicates the capacity of trees to serve as both material and symbolic symbols of national identity. In an age of global climate crisis, these texts together demonstrate the utility of the forest as a bridge between nature, humanity, and the nation.

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