Mass-Producing Traditional Small Cities: Gottfried Feder's Vision for a Greater Nazi Germany

Abstract

Gottfried Feder (1883-1941) joined the newly founded Nazi movement in 1919 and became a leading writer and spokesman on economics, architecture, and urban development. He condemned usury, finance capital, large corporations, metropolitan growth, and modernist architecture, and he advocated family-owned businesses, state enterprises, small cities, and “traditional” styles. After Hitler came to power, Feder worked in government, but he was marginalized in 1934 and appointed professor of planning at the Berlin Institute of Technology. There, he wrote Die neue Stadt ( The New City), a major book published in 1939 but largely ignored in Germany—in wartime because it criticized big business and afterward because Feder was a leading Nazi. The book blends fascist, modernist, antiurban, and geopolitical visions to propose the construction of many new traditional cities of twenty thousand in supposedly sparsely populated eastern lands. It shows how innocuous planning ideas may be appropriated for sinister purposes of conquest and social engineering.

Claiming the Countryside: Ekistics, Socio-Political Conflicts, and Emerging Cold-War Geopolitics During Greek Reconstruction

“…Personal notes from his readings at the time show that his primary influence were German location theories, and more importantly, the 1933 study on ' central places' by the geographer Walter Christaller, which prioritized geographic and economic factors in the spatial distribution and organization of settlements. Moreover, the social and cultural value of the small and medium-sized rural settlements were also dominant in inter-war Germany, both before and under the Nazi regime (Schenk and Bromley 2003), with which Doxiadis came in contact in 1936 while completing his doctoral thesis in Berlin (Tsiambaos 2017). Another complementary pool of sources included British regional planning ideas, such as those found in Patrick Abercrombie's Town and Country Planning of 1943, which reinforced his conviction of the necessity of shaping a centralized planning approach that advocated the control of urban growth and a balance between urban centres and the countryside.…”

Interventions on European nationalist populism and bordering in time of emergencies

“…Next, we could investigate how self-styled populist movements, looking for cultural and demographic renewal against what they see as decadent democratic liberalism, have used the city in its various historical forms as a source of inspiration or of disgust. Nazi, Fascist, and Communist regimes all held the city in ambiguous regard: as a symbol of decadence, national decline or depravity on the one hand, and of potential renewal on the other, where rationality, monumentality, and a modern aesthetic could sweep away the past ( Caprotti, 2007 ; Lane, 1986 ; Schenk & Bromley, 2003 ). Today, regimes claiming to represent the popular will tend not to undertake grand urban planning projects in the same way as in the past, but the city still serves as a convenient reference point for populist demagogues and partisans.…”

Topographies/topologies of the camp: Auschwitz as a spatial threshold

“…The figure of Gottfried Feder, one of the founders of the German Worker's Party and a key player in Nazi urban planning, is a revealing example of this tension between the two spatial logics. While occupying the Chair of Urban Design at the Technische Universität Berlin, he developed a comprehensive theory of urban design which, after the beginning of the war, matched to some extent Himmler's vision of urban rearticulation of the annexed territories (Schenk and Bromley, 2003;also, Taylor, 1974). Feder embodied one of the most radical interpretations of the calculative rationality of the day, a rationality that constituted the domain of Nazi urban and regional planning, especially in his attempts to theorise the 'ideal' size of a Nazi city (20,000 inhabitants), its economic and productive structures, and its very hierarchical and holistic articulation based on a set of nested scales (household, block, cell, local group, district, province, etc.).…”

“…This paper intends to address the somewhat surprisingly scarce interest in human geography for the broader spatialities of Auschwitz and, more in general, of Nazism and the Holocaust. Several authors have investigated specific aspects of the geographies of the Third Reich, including questions of landscape and memory (Charlesworth, 1992;2004a;2004b;Charlesworth et al, 2006;Keil, 2005;Olin, 1997;Stenning et al, 2008); spatial planning in the Third Reich (Clarke et al, 1996;Elden, 2003;2006a;Rössler, 1989;Schenk and Bromley, 2003); and the spatial organization of the ghetto (Cole, 2003;Cole and Graham, 1995). But despite these important contributions, a broad and open debate on these questions and their relationship to modernity has yet to be engaged by the discipline.…”