Walking Migge's gardens — what became of the plots at Britz, Römerstadt and Törten a hundred years on

Leberecht Migge's life and thought were the subject of an earlier column, Hitler and Migge: subsistence gardens in the age of 'Blood and Soil' — what the Green Manifesto argued, what the productive Siedlung that designed house and plot as one unit actually was, how he imagined the city's cycle of matter, and how that vocabulary was bent toward 'Blood and Soil'. None of it is repeated here. This is not an intellectual history of Migge, nor of the Bauhaus. It is a record of the land they actually drew.

Day two, on the allotment ordinance that hunger wrote on 31 July 1919, looked at the day the machinery for protecting gardens was written into law. Today we walk the gardens that sit outside that law. The private subsistence plots that Weimar-era modernist estates attached to their houses were a different animal from allotments: not leased, not tied to club membership, simply a field that came with the house. What became of them a century on? Four sites — Berlin-Britz, Frankfurt-Römerstadt, and Ziebigk and Törten in Dessau — checked on four points: area, dates, protection, present condition.

According to the Berlin state heritage office, on 26 July 2026 the 48th session of the UNESCO World Heritage Committee, meeting in Busan, South Korea, inscribed Waldsiedlung Zehlendorf as the seventh component of the World Heritage site 'Housing Estates in the Berlin Modern Style'. The site had been inscribed in 2008 with six estates; this is its first extension in eighteen years. Waldsiedlung Zehlendorf was built between 1926 and 1932 to designs by Bruno Taut, Hugo Häring and Otto Rudolf Salvisberg — 1,917 dwellings in all, 1,108 of them flats in blocks of up to three storeys and 809 single-family houses. The open space of this estate, set among pines, was designed by Migge and Martha Willings-Göhre.

What earned the inscription is the estate as a whole, not its gardens: the continuous flat roofs, the differentiated colouring, the fit into the existing forest, the handling of traffic. The announcement does, however, name Migge as designer of the open space. So a second estate carrying his hand — after Britz in 2008 — is now part of a World Heritage site; twice in a century has the heritage system taken his work into its protection. Which raises the question of what, in substance, has been protected. From here, four sites on the ground.