Hitler and Migge: subsistence gardens in the age of 'Blood and Soil'

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.

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.'