The ideology of the nature garden. Nationalistic trends in garden design in Germany during the early twentieth century

Abstract

Theoretical concepts of garden design are an integral part of social and political conditions and the intellectual history of a particular period. Now and then garden architects have developed specific concepts of garden design in order to convey an explicit political message. Around 1900, an ideology of the nature garden was developed for the design of German gardens. Although it claimed to be based on scholarship, its intention was clearly political. It was hostile to internationalism and was founded on nationalistic and racist ideas. Early on it paved the way for National Socialist ideology in German garden design, and it has relevance even today. Nearly eight decades later, around 1980, a new ideology of the nature garden, with seemingly no connection to its historical predecessor, emerged as a result of so-called ecological tendencies. We cannot discuss these present-day tendencies here. We focus on the early twentieth century and, in order to do this, we go back briefly to the second half of the nineteenth century.