Leseprobe

81 H Hellerau, created as an adaptation of English urban planner Ebenezer Howard’s garden city concept, was one of the most progressive settlements of the early 20th century, with a reform programme that encompassed all areas of life. The Hellerau pioneers provided ground-breaking inspiration for a social and resource-saving approach to urban development, a typification of small housing construction, an exemplary housing culture, healthy working conditions, cultural education, as well as the creation of modern living spaces for a new kind of community. This paper will shed light on the holistic aspirations and the wide variety of ideas of the Lebensreform movement in Hellerau at that time by describing the evidence for them that is still manifest in the structure of the settlement and the inventory of buildings. The foundation and Lebensreform aspirations of Hellerau Garden City The initiator of Hellerau Garden City was the socially engaged furniture maker and arts and crafts reformer Karl Schmidt, who, with the support of philanthropic friends and clients, founded Hellerau’s non-profit Gartenstadtgesellschaft (Garden City Society) and its Baugenossenschaft (Cooperative Building Society) in 1908. The major players supporting Schmidt in his endeavour included architects Richard Riemerschmid and Hermann Muthesius as well as economist Friedrich Naumann and patron of the arts Wolf Dohrn, to name but a few. The Garden City Society acquired 132 hectares of land north of Dresden from 73 farmers in order to build a new production site for its factory, the Deutsche Werkstätten (German Workshops), along with a model settlement. The fact that the Deutscher Werkbund (German Association of Craftsmen) – whose first office was located here – stemmed from an initiative on the part of major players in Hellerau illustrates just how far-reaching this garden city’s aspirations towards education in aesthetics was. Hellerau’s versatile and well-connected founders were all initial members or even founders of other reform organisations as well – for example, the Deutsche Gartenstadtgesellschaft (German Garden City Society), the Verein für Wohnungsreform (Association for Housing Reform), the Bund für Bodenreform (Association for Land Reform), as well as the Bund für Heimat- und Naturschutz (Association for Homeland and Nature Conservation). They pursued the shared vision of overall social renewal. Early visitors to the settlement acknowledged this endeavour to effect reform for the whole of society in their characterisations of Hellerau: as a “laboratory for a new humanity” (Paul Claudel, 1914);1 as a “little garden for humanity” (Christian Morgenstern, 1913); and as an “experimental station for social culture” (Karl Scheffler, 1914).2 What Hellerau aspired to, what it still bears testimony to, is unique – and yet at the same time symptomatic of the spirit of optimism in the early years of the 20th century. Dohrn, who founded Hellerau’s Educational Institute for eurhythmics educator Émile Jaques-Dalcroze, aptly captured the overall mood of the times: “The air is full of slogans, praises, illusions, projects, ideas and attempts, each in its own way yearning to bring redemption, culture, freedom, life, health and – who knows what else – to mankind. [...] I very much fear [...] we will sometimes be mistaken for such starry-­ eyed idealists! And we will probably have to put up with that, too.”3 The Lebensreform movement and the idea of the garden city Today, the diverse reform efforts in the German-speaking world of those times are bundled under the umbrella term Lebensreform. Within their individual reform movements, followers of the so-called Lebensreform movement were reacting to the problematic impact of industrialisation on the people and the environment, and were striving for social change. A healthy lifestyle for body and soul in the community4 was a key objective of reform. Many of the individual ideas were intertwined. A lot of the inspiration for these movements came from England – the leading industrial nation at the time – where the quest for solutions to the problems ensuing from industrialisation had got off to an earlier start. First and foremost, there was the Garden City Movement. With his garden city model, [Fig. 1] Ebenezer Howard had proposed a comprehensive concept which would gain global significance for the development of urban planning in the 20th century. His aim was to put a stop to the rampant growth of the big cities by founding garden cities. Based on a novel land-use regulation, independent cities were to be created, with a limited population of 32,000, with their own industry and commerce, and with a green belt for recreation and agriculture. In such settlements, the short travel distances between home and workplace as well as to cultural and supply facilities would permit a zoning of functions. Thanks to lower-density housing construction and sufficient green areas, life would be healthier than in the big cities and also, thanks to a community ownership model, more social. In Howard’s garden city concept, followers of the Lebensreform movement in Germany recognised a highly promising way of achieving their goals: by merging the multitude of reform ideas they had, and implementing these through the foundation of garden cities. Consequently, numerous Lebensreform proponents, for example members of the Neue Gemeinschaft (New

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