Nature and Ideology: Natural Garden Design in ... - Dumbarton Oaks

The Nationalization of Nature and
the Naturalization of the German Nation:
“Teutonic” Trends in Early Twentieth-Century
Landscape Design
JOACHIM WOLSCHKE-BULMAHN
This paper deals with the issue “Nature and Ideology” in the context of trends in German
landscape design during the early twentieth century. The design of gardens and landscapes
is often considered to be an innocuous, nonpolitical task free of ideology. One of the purposes of
this study is to demonstrate the sometimes highly political and ideological character of this task
and of landscape architecture as a discipline. The ideological character of German landscape
design in the early twentieth century can be most clearly elucidated using examples of natural
garden and landscape design, showing how a group of German landscape architects fostered
nationalism and racist ideas about society and fought an international orientation with their
concepts of natural garden design that were developed during the early twentieth century. These
concepts were influenced by particular ideas about the German nation and the German people
and their alleged specific relationship to nature that arose in the nineteenth century.
The first part of this paper focuses on the development of such nineteenth-century ideas
about the assumed relationship between nature and the German people. These ideas and their
underlying ideology influenced landscape design in the changed political and social conditions of
early twentieth-century Germany. The second part illustrates how such ideas influenced concepts
of natural landscape design and discusses three specific sites in northern Germany: two
cemeteries, the Place of the Ancestors Hilligenloh (Ahnenstätte Hilligenloh) (Fig. 1) and the
Place of the Ancestors Seelenfeld (Ahnenstätte Seelenfeld) (Fig. 2); and the Grove of the Saxons
(Sachsenhain), a gathering place for Heinrich Himmler’s SS near Verden on the river Aller (Fig.
3). The Grove of the Saxons was designed in 1935, and the Place of the Ancestors Seelenfeld
around 1930, shortly before the takeover by the Nazis; the exact date of the opening of the
I want to thank Linda Safran, of the Catholic University of America, for discussing several versions of this text
with me.
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