Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
luted air and skies, the “ghettoizing” of workers in undesirable districts, and
unhealthy living conditions.
39
Of even greater concern to Germans of this
generation was the destruction of community, of
Gemeinschaft
(whose dis-
tinction from
Gesellschaft
was so critical to Ferdinand Tönnies and to the
sociologists of the Frankfurt school).
40
If environment was a shaping force
of society, as they believed, then who could predict what moral and spiri-
tual damage would result from depriving the people of the open air and
healing light of the countryside, natural connections to the land, and the
joys of rural community? Such concerns, coupled with Germany's long his-
tory of anti-city sentiments, framed the planning for Salzgitter.
Yet the Reich was not willing to forgo the power afforded by techno-
logy, the foundation of economic, military, and political strength for the
modern nation state. In inventing Salzgitter, therefore, it pursued a seem-
ingly paradoxical course: aiming to preserve the environmental benefits of
traditional rural life while building up the nation's industrial and military
muscle.
THE GERMAN ENVIRONMENTAL IDEOLOGY
Incorporating ideas from Britain, Italy, and the United States, the German
neue Stadt
was a retranslation of the New Town concept in terms of
National Socialist values.The solutions to housing, industrial, and environ-
mental problems were wrapped in a “blood and soil” ideology that found
peculiar expression in a paradoxical Nazi world view, combining progres-
sivism and atavism—an awe of modern industrial might with a nostalgic
pre-modern vision of the
Volk,
a romantic myth of small-town agrarian
Germany (a cultural contradiction that Jeffrey Herf has labeled “reactionary
modernism”).
41
This contradictory ideology was the basis for Germany's famous
Sied-
lungs
(settlement) program, which besides Salzgitter built thousands of new
towns during the 1920s and the 1930s.
42
Salzgitter was intended as a model
project of the type.The program, an expression of German anti-urban sen-
timents that go at least as far back as the seventeenth century, was a direct
offshoot of Ebenezer Howard's turn-of-the-century Garden City move-
ment, which had found an immediate and enthusiastic following in Ger-
many. Howard's invention of the green-belted city, strictly limited to a
population of 30,000 and combining industry and country in a new
organic relationship, had German parallels in the contemporary anti-urban,
