179 Deutsche Gartenstadtgesellschaft (German Garden City Society), founded in 1902 in Berlin-Schlachtensee, of misusing the garden-city concept described in his 1896 publication Die Stadt der Zukunft (The City of the Future) for its “liberal” agenda. Likewise, Pudor – who was also a friend of Tanzmann – voiced highly disparaging opinions about the garden city to the north of Dresden. According to him, the garden-city concept advocated by the Deutsche Gartenstadtgesellschaft was clearly “un-Germanic” and any garden city founded by that society was nothing more than “a kind of ‘posh sitting room’ of modern industry, made to accommodate the industrial population of a large factory, as, for example, in Hellerau near Dresden”.9 However, followers of the völkisch movement were also on a quest. Just like today’s neo-völkisch movement, they were looking for the putative characteristics of what they believed to be true “German culture” and the equally putative characteristics of true “German community”. One of these seekers was Bruno Tanzmann. Like present-day publisher Götz Kubitschek – born in Ravensburg in 1970, founder of a völkisch-minded Institut für Staatspolitik (Institute for State Policy) in Schnellroda in Anhalt in 2000, and intellectual figurehead of today’s völkisch movement – Tanzmann, in 1913 and 1917, announced plans for the foundation of a völkisch-minded German Volkshochschule (Adult Education Centre) in Hellerau. The school’s mission would be to define, describe and teach the original essence of German culture – an agenda that intentionally and explicitly dissociated itself from the prevailing humanistic ideology of the so-called “Pedagogical Province”10 that the garden city was home to in the years before and after the First World War. According to historian Justus H. Ulbricht, representatives of the Vereinigung für Vaterländische Vorträge (Association for Patriotic Lectures), the Bund für deutsche Volkshochschulen (Association of German Adult Education Centres) and the Sigfrids-Gilde of the Deutsche Orden (the Sigfrid’s Guild of the German Order) all met in Hellerau at Tanzmann’s invitation in December 1917 to plan the foundation of an Arndt-Hochschule (Arndt University). Hellerau was also the venue, on 7 December, for a “preparatory committee” for this planned university which included high-ranking figureheads of the völkisch movement like educationalists Theodor Scheffer and Wilhelm Schwaner as well as völkisch-settlement founder Ernst Hunkel. In January 1918, the members of this committee appointed Ernst Moritz Arndt as the patron of future völkisch adult education. However, the actual foundation of the völkisch-minded Arndt-Hochschule in Berlin did not take place until September of the following year, swifter action having been hindered by the war and the November Revolution of 1918.11 Hellerau became involved in the founding of this institute through Bruno Tanzmann, the völkisch publisher and protagonist who lived there. Similarly, the garden city was the venue for several meetings of leading representatives of völkisch-oriented adult education at the end of the First World War and the beginning of the 1920s, for example regarding the foundation of the Hakenkreuzverlag (Swastika Publishing House) and also, in 1919, the foundation of the Bismarck- Hochschule (Bismarck University),12 which was based in Dresden. Their aim was to reinterpret the above-mentioned “Pedagogical Province” – characterised by Goethe as humanistically-oriented – in their own interests, namely as völkisch-oriented. According to sociologist Stefan Breuer, the völkisch movement manifested itself primarily as a hubris of the Lebensreform
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