With this excellent compendium there is a comprehensive presentation of all areas of the last one and a half centuries, with a focus in particular on the last 60 years, which has hitherto had no equivalent in its kind. This work is expressly recommended to anyone involved with questions of the development of water management – in whatever field.

…the authors (position themselves) in the natural tension between the interests of water protection advocates and water users as committed water protectionists. This is already rooted in their profession, which qualifies them as experts proven in both theory and practice of water management to deliver a work in which they address all relevant issues of water protection in a matter-of-fact and balanced way, appropriately including the aspects to be considered – scientific, technical, legal, economic and political.

It is also worth emphasising that the authors incorporate the extensive background knowledge they gathered in their management roles into the analyses. Those who read the handy book will learn, in a manner analogous to a chronologically structured guide, what constitutes water protection in all its complexity and how it functions, steered by various and multilayered standards.

A concluding remark from a legal perspective: the thorough explanations of the legal basis of water protection, which occupy a large space, give no cause to ask critically why no water lawyer participated in the author team.

The differentiation between West and East German conditions largely determines the authors' historical review. While the prehistory and the first 80 years of the period under consideration make up only 30 pages in the book, the “water protection in the FRG” is traced in detail over 100 pages and the water protection in the GDR over the following 70 pages.

However, the paradigm shift central to water law then occurred with the EU Water Framework Directive of 2000, which also resolved the intra-European strategic conflict between the immissions and emissions principles in favour of a combined, holistic approach…

The book traces the developments of water law in Germany against the background of the qualitative state of the water bodies and their progressive improvement up to today and in the context of technical and scientific development. The main part deals with the situation under the rule of the Water Resources Act, proclaimed in 1957 and in force since 1960, initially in West Germany, then since 1990 in all of Germany.

One of the authors, an eyewitness, provides a detailed (for the first time?) account of the development of water protection in the GDR. It was shaped by the priority of industrial production combined with increasing administrative centralisation. At the end of the GDR, the condition of many water bodies, especially in the industrial conurbations, was catastrophic.

The conclusion states: "Once again it is proven that blind faith in market forces - combined with the dismantling of the state - leads particularly in public services to failure. Those who rely on the markets to fix things in the end allow a few to enrich themselves at the expense of the general public, the environment and health…"