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

“TEUTONIC” TRENDS
5. Frontispiece of Willy Pastor’s book
Aus germanischer Vorzeit, Berlin, 1907
the German Reich in 1871, the nationalization of all spheres of life became more and more
reactionary in character. Teutonic history was more and more aggressively contrasted as superior
to the cultural traditions of other peoples.
Thus one can recognize at the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century an increasing
search for the heritage of the German people in order to substantiate the claim of the German
Reich for world power. Particular attention was paid, with regard to a Germanic heritage, to a
specific relationship of the German people to nature and landscape. One should mention, for
example, the art historian Josef Strzygowski (1862–1941) and the writer Willy Pastor (1867–
1933). Pastor, Strzygowski, and also the landscape architect Willy Lange belonged to the same
generation, born in the 1860s. Pastor discussed ideas about the history of the ancient Germanic
tribes in numerous publications and, for example, tried to correct the image “of the often defamed
‘barbaric’ early history of Germania” 16 in his one-sided book From Germanic Prehistoric
Times (Aus germanischer Vorzeit) (Fig. 5), published in 1907. Pastor’s works and numerous other
publications were intended to prove the outstandingly high cultural level of the prehistoric Germanic
tribes. For Pastor there was no doubt that “as well as the decisive waves of people, the
decisive waves of culture came from the North.” 17 He believed in, as he called it, the “doctrine of
the Nordic origin of any culture.” 18 Similarly, Strzygowski complained that the high level of
16 W. Pastor, Aus germanischer Vorzeit, Berlin, 1907, “Vorwort.”
17 Ibid., 11.
18 W. Pastor, Die Erde in der Zeit des Menschen: Versuch einer naturwissenschaftlichen Kunstgeschichte, Jena and Leipzig,
1904, 189.
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