List of German utopian communities
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German Utopian Communities are historic intentional communities that were formed in wake of various social movements from the mid 19th-century until the 1930s. Estimates show that around 100 communities were created between 1918 and 1933.[3] But data is unreliable.[4] Although communities were ideologically diverse, they shared a common sense of mission in their exemplary function for German society at large.[5]
Background
Rural life has been romanticized since antiquity, for example in concepts such as Arcadia or the biblical Garden of Eden.
Due to technological, medical and agricultural advances, the population of the European continent doubled during the 19th century, from approximately 200 million to more than 400 million[6]. Approximately 70 million people emigrated from Europe, with most migrating to the United States.[7] The countries also urbanized with numerous cities worldwide surpassing populations of a million or more during this century. Early in the century, various land reform ideas were expressed first by individual socio-eonomists like Friedrich Engels to relief urban poverty. The Prussian and later German government designed official land reform programms under the name of interior colonization, through which barren and infertile land (in the east) could be transformed into homesteads for the urban poor.
Map
List
| Name | Location | Founder | Founding date | Ending date | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Eden Gemeinnützige Obstbau-Siedlung | Germany | 18 Lebensreformer with commercial leadership from Bruno Wilhelmi | 1893 | currently active | First Vegetarian vegetable Cooperative in Germany. It had a population of around 1500 people as of 2008. |
| Frauensiedlung Schwarze Erde | Germany | Elisabeth Vogler and Marie Buchhold | 1925 | 1951 | Women's Cooperative inspired by the Lebensreform movement and reform pedagogy - including agriculture, workshops, a children's sanatorium and gymnastics school. |
| Habertshof | Germany | Max Zink, Emil Blum | 1919 | 1933 | Religious-socialist commune and school. |
| Bruderhof Communities | Germany | Eberhard and Emmy Arnold | 1920 | 1937 | Religious community inspired by the German Youth Movement and Anabaptism. Had left the country entirely by 1938 due to pressure from the Nazi government. Attempts to reestablish communties in Germany were made in 1955-1961, 1988-1996 and 2002. There is currently one active Bruderhof in Germany and one in Austria. |
| Sinntalhof | Germany | Bernhard Uffrecht, Ernst Putz, Gertrud and Max Bondy | 1919 or 1920 | 1923 | Temporary site of two Schools as part of the pedagogic reform movement and meeting place for groups of the German Youth Movement. It was aquired and used by a Bruderhof Community from 1955 to 1961. |
| Heimland | Germany | Theodor Fritsch | 1908 | 1922 | Founded as a Cooperative inspired by the Garden City and Völkisch movements. After draft into World War I only four settlers returned alive. Among rising inflation and agricultural difficulties, the community dissolved in 1922. |
| Siedlung Schatzacker | Switzerland | Werner Zimmermann, Rudolf Müller, Paul Enz | 1932 | 2007 | Vegetable and land reform cooperative inspired by similar communities like Eden and Heimgarten and Silvio Gesell's principles of Freiwirtschaft. |
| Monte Verità | Switzerland | Ida Hofmann, Henri Oedenkoven, Lotte Hattemer and Karl and Gustav Gräser | 1899 or 1900 | 1940 | Vegetarian vegetable cooperative, sanatorium and artist colony frequented by supporters of various alternative movements, utopian-socialists, anarchists, pacifists and artists. An attempt at a revival in the late 1970s met with limited success. |
| Obstbaugenossenschaft Heimgarten | Switzerland | Julius Sponheimer, Friedrich Fellenberg | 1892 or 1893 | 1905 | Vegetable cooperative founded on the Principles of the Lebensreform movement. Settled especially by Germans who opposed the compulsory vaccination adopted in the German Reich in 1874. |
| Freidorf | Switzerland | Verband Schweizerischer Konsumvereine, Bernhard Jäggi, Johann Friedrich Schär | 1921 | currently active | Cooperative village inspired by Utopian socialism with around 600 inhabitants. Consumer goods and insurance were purchased collectively. A proposed second village was never build. Today it is owned by Coop. |
| Reformsiedlung Eden (Vienna) | Austria | Various | 1921 | unknown | Anachist and land reformist cooperative built with help from various alternative communities such as the Theosophical Society and Baptists. |
| Hellerau | Germany | Karl Schmidt | 1909 | currently active | First garden city in Germany. |
| Siedlung Hellauf/Vogelhof | Germany | Friedrich Schöll, Hans Reichert, Otto Mayr | 1921 | 1938 | A vegetable cooperative as part of the völkisch movement. Used as a reform pedagogic boarding school (Landerziehungsheim) after 1925. After 1945 it became a school again but there was no continuation of persons or ideals.[9] |
| Mittgart Siedlungen | Germany | Willibald Hentschel | c. 1904 | c. 1914 | Inspired by Hentschel's utopian novel Mittgart, communities of unknown size were formed somewhere in Lower-Saxony with the help of state funding, for the purpose of breeding the german race. They did not last until the first world war.[10] |
| Freilandsiedlung Donnershag/ Deutsch-Ordens-Land | Germany | Margart and Ernst Hunkel | 1919 | 1924 | Funded with state resources, Donnershag had 50 members and up to 350 at its height. [11][12] Differences in its publishing enterprise led to its demize in 1924. [13] |
| Humanitas commune Höllriegelskreuth | Germany | Karl Wilhelm Diefenbach | 1885 | 1892 | A small commune formed around the painter and lebensreformer Karl Wilhelm Diefenbach. |
| Humanitas Himmelhof commune | Germany | Karl Wilhelm Diefenbach, Gustav Gräser | 1897 | 1899 | A commune of up to 24 members, formed around the painter and lebensreformer Karl Wilhelm Diefenbach after the first one in Höllriegelskreuth. It also inspired the Monte Verità commune. |
| Worpswede | Germany | Mimi Stolte, Fritz Mackensen, and other painters, Heinrich Vogeler | 1889 | currently active | Influential art colony and garden city including a Siedlerschule (school for settlers) and Leberecht Migge's Sonnenhof founded in 1920. After the first world war, Vogeler became increasingly interested in ideological matters, joined the communist party, and emigrated to the soviet union in 1931. |
| Loheland | Germany | Hedwig van Rohden and Lousie Langgaard | 1919 | currently active | Founded as a reform school and gymnastics school, today it is an anthroposipic settlement. |
| Freie Erde | Germany | 25 Anarchists, among them Anton Rosinke | 1921 | 1923 | Anarcho-Syndicate commune inspired by the ideas of Gustav Landauer. It was officially recognized and sublet to the squatters by the government in 1922. In 1923 the group split due to differences on matters of polygamy and only one couple remained in the house.[14] |
| Neue Gemeinschaft | Germany | Brothers Julius and Heinrich Hart and Gustav Landauer | 1900 | 1904 | Anarcho-Communist commune. |
Interpretations
Bernd Wedemeyer-Kolwe describes four lines of interpretation which roughly follow and build on each other chronologically.
Early scholarship from the 60s onwards saw reform movements as ersatz religion and compensation of the bourgeois middle class, which was loosing political influence between growing capitalist magnates and under pressure from a rising working class. Settlements, then, were a romantic-utopian escapism from mass industrialization into the personal and individual.[15]
Building on this, researchers of the 70s and 80s increasingly saw aspects of socio-political protest incorporated into the allegedly private reform movements. This bourgeois-anti-bourgeois paradox was extensively examined in scholarship from then on and later became seen as an essential character of modernism, because "modernity stands in it's essence continually in opposition to itself".[16]
Finally, a majority of contemporary scholars now view the reform movements not as escape from or protest against modernity, but instead its very forerunners. Wedemeyer-Kolwe points out that this also adequately reflects the self-perception of those people involved in the 19th century reform movements, who thought themselves "rational, modern and progressive".[17]
According to another fringe interpretation presented by Barlösius[18] and Wedemeyer-Kolbe, the reform movements allowed members of a newly developing middle class to assimilated themselves into and absorb the former bourgeois lifestyle and values, which became the new mainstream in the early 20th century.[19] Eisenberg also observed this in the history of association football.[20]
There has been no updated overview on the settlement aspect of German 19th century reform movements in particular since the handbook of 1998.[21] Furthermore, "interpretations of the historic phenomenon in its global context are still missing".[22]
Influence
When alternative movements became popular again in the 1960s they were seemingly unaware of their ancestral roots. Researchers with biographic backgrounds in the new movements, especially those involved in the Protests of 1968, then revived interest in the topic.[23]
The change of millennia brought another wave of interest in sustainability due to widespread fears of ecological collapse.[24] A list of post-war and contemporary intentional communities can be found at list of intentional communities#germany.
See also
- List of Finnish utopian communities
- List of American utopian communities
- Global Ecovillage Network
- Intentional Community
- German Youth Movement
- Garden City Movement
- Lebensreform
- back-to-the-land movement
- Tolstoyan movement
- Land reform in Prussia
- Ecovillage
- Agrarianism
- Homesteading
References
- ↑ Wedemeyer-Kolwe 2017, p. 124.
- ↑ Opitz, Manuel (2018). "Künstler, Kulturrebell, Kommunarde:Karl Wilhelm Diefenbach" [Artist, cultural rebel, communard: Karl Wilhelm Diefenbach] (in Deutsch). Hamburg: DER SPIEGEL Geschichte. Retrieved 2022-01-15.
- ↑ Conti 1984, p. 66-149.
- ↑ Wedemeyer-Kolwe 2017, p. 132.
- ↑ Feuchter-Schawelka 1998, p. 232.
- ↑ "Modernization – Population Change". Encyclopædia Britannica. Archived from the original on April 6, 2009.
- ↑ The Atlantic: Can the US afford immigration? Archived 2010-07-04 at the Wayback Machine. Migration News. December 1996.
- ↑ Exact location unknown
- ↑ "Historie". Vogelhof Seminare. Retrieved 2022-12-26.
- ↑ Weingart 1984, p. 179.
- ↑ Conti 1984, p. 123.
- ↑ "Zeitgeschichte in Hessen . Daten . Fakten . Hintergründe". Landesgeschichtliches Informationssystem Hessen. Retrieved 2023-01-03.
- ↑ Feuchter-Schawelka 1998, p. 234.
- ↑ Feuchter-Schawelka 1998, p. 239.
- ↑ Wedemeyer-Kolwe 2017, p. 159 f.
- ↑ Wedemeyer-Kolwe 2017, p. 160 f.
- ↑ Wedemeyer-Kolwe 2017, p. 162.
- ↑ Barlösius, Eva (1997). Naturgemäße Lebensführung: Zur Geschichte der Lebensreform um die Jahrhundertwende (in german).CS1 maint: Unrecognized language (link) Search this book on
- ↑ Wedemeyer-Kolwe 2017, p. 163.
- ↑ Eisenberg, Christiane (1999). "English sports" und deutsche Bürger: Eine Gesellschaftgechichte 1800-1939 (in german).CS1 maint: Unrecognized language (link) Search this book on
- ↑ Wedemeyer-Kolwe 2017, p. 13.
- ↑ Vanja, Christina (2018-12-05). "Review". Historische Zeitschrift. 307 (3): 870–871. doi:10.1515/hzhz-2018-1578.
In der Tat steht eine überzeugende Gesamtdeutung des historischen Phänomens der Lebensreformbewegung insbesondere im internationalen Vergleich noch aus.
- ↑ Wedemeyer-Kolwe 2017, p. 158.
- ↑ Grober 1998, p. 8.
Further Reading
- Wedemeyer-Kolwe, Bernd (2017). Aufbruch: Die Lebensreform in Deutschland (in German). Darmstadt: Philipp von Zabern. ISBN 978-3-8053-5067-9.CS1 maint: Unrecognized language (link) Search this book on
- Grober, Ulrich (1998). Ausstieg in die Zukunft: eine Reise zu Ökosiedlungen, Energie-Werkstätten und Denkfabriken (in German). Berlin: Links. ISBN 3-86153-159-3.CS1 maint: Unrecognized language (link) Search this book on
- Feuchter-Schawelka, Anne (1998). "Siedlungs- und Landkommune-Bewegung". In Kerbs, Diethart; Reulecke, Jürgen. Handbuch der deutschen Reformbewegungen 1880-1933. Wuppertal: Peter Hammer Verlag. pp. 227–244. ISBN 3-87294-787-7. Search this book on
- Conti, Christoph (1984). Abschied vom Bürgertum. Alternative Bewegungen in Deutschland von 1890 bis heute (in German). Reinbeck.CS1 maint: Unrecognized language (link) Search this book on
- Weingart, Peter (1984). "Eugenic Utopias: Blueprints for the Rationalization of Human Evolution". In Mendelsohn, Everett; Nowotny, Helga. Nineteen eighty-four: science between utopia and dystopia. Dodrecht: D. Reidel publishing company. pp. 173–188. ISBN 90-277-1719-2. Search this book on
- Linse, Ulrich (1983). Zurück, o Mensch, zur Mutter Erde. Landkommunen in Deutschland 1890 - 1933 (in German). Munich: dtv. ISBN 978-3423029346.CS1 maint: Unrecognized language (link) Search this book on
- Mosse, George L. (2021). "Germanic Utopias". The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich. University of Wisconsin Press. pp. 109–126. ISBN 9780299332044. Unknown parameter
|orig-date=ignored (help) Search this book on - Becker, George (1930). Die Siedlung der deutschen Jugendbewegung: Eine soziologische Untersuchung. Universität Köln. Search this book on
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