Hitler and Migge: subsistence gardens in the age of 'Blood and Soil'
Two dreams loaded onto the garden — from Weimar idealism to the agrarian ideology of National Socialism
2026-06-24 · 24 min read
In early-twentieth-century Germany the garden was a political front line. Amid the hunger and housing crisis after the First World War, the landscape architect Leberecht Migge declared 'Everyone self-sufficient!' and—together with Bauhaus modernists and architects such as Bruno Taut and Ernst May—built 'productive Siedlungen' that designed housing and food gardens as one. Yet the same vocabulary of 'soil' and 'self-sufficiency' was also appropriated by the Nazis' 'Blood and Soil' (Blut und Boden) ideology. Drawing on a range of historical scholarship, this column traces how a tool of emancipation was bent toward agrarian nationalism, pivoting on Migge's life (1881–1935) and the closure of the Bauhaus (1933). Hitler and Migge—two names that should never meet—mark the opposite poles of a twentieth-century question about city and land.
Opening
The garden is political
Few people associate the vegetable garden with politics or ideology. But in early-twentieth-century Germany, who grew what and where was a question that staked the very shape of society. Giving urban workers a small plot was at once insurance against hunger, a housing policy, and—at times—bound up with the idea of forging a 'healthy nation.' The garden could be a tool of liberation or a tool of domination.
This column sets side by side two names that embody those poles. One is the landscape architect Leberecht Migge, who tied the ideal of 'a garden for everyone' to modernist social housing. The other is Adolf Hitler—or more precisely the 'Blood and Soil' ideology of the Nazi regime. Following the historical scholarship, we watch the same words, 'soil' and 'self-sufficiency,' mobilised toward almost opposite ends.
The setting
Weimar: hunger and a housing crisis
Defeat in the First World War and the upheaval that followed left German cities in severe food shortage and a housing crisis. The Weimar constitution pledged adequate housing in Article 155, but amid chronic shortages that promise was not easily redeemed (Silverman, 1970). It was precisely this crisis that made garden-equipped housing estates (Siedlungen) and visions of self-sufficiency an urgent, serious proposition.
'Grow your own food': an idea that resonates with today's urban farms was, in that Germany, a practical demand bound up with survival. The person who gave that demand its most systematic theory and design was Leberecht Migge. From here, the paid section digs in turn into Migge's vision, its links to the Bauhaus, and the turn toward 'Blood and Soil.'
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