This article investigates the interplay between the changing ways the edge of the city was imagined and the varying physical forms imposed upon it at the turn of the twentieth century, a period of rapid urban growth in Germany. It focuses on Munich, and the attempts of its planning and journalistic elites to define, manage and ultimately cross the city's borders. In the 1890s in Germany, bureaucrats were envisaging the spaces beyond the urban boundary at a time when the dominant metaphors of twentieth-century city-edge planning – be they green belt, sprawl, Stadtrand – were not yet current.Footnote ¹ These practitioners were working outside of most of the ‘movements’ that dominate the intellectual history of planning in the early twentieth century, which focuses so much attention on the origins of the ‘garden city’ idea.Footnote ² Thus, this article contributes to the decentring of the canon of planning giants – be they movements or individuals – in the writing of planning history. It presents a planning elite acting in a localized way, suggesting that while they were aware of, and contributed to, a wider planning discourse, the canonical nature of planning history may be an obstacle to understanding specific spatial solutions or policies.Footnote ³ Furthermore, Carl Abbott suggests that planning history has been highly segregated from the concerns of ‘mainstream’ urban history – such as identity formation, modernization or religion.Footnote ⁴ This paper's focus on planning outside the canon is intended to be a contribution to bridging the fracture Abbott identifies between planning and other themes in the writing of urban history, such as cultural responses to modernity, or the role of cities in national histories.

Central to the transformations of urban models was the process of physically crossing boundaries and planting ‘settlements’ in the non-urban space beyond. Much excellent scholarship exists on the enlargement of cities in Germany in this period in general, and on Munich in particular, but they have tended to focus on the growing city from an institutional or technical standpoint.Footnote ⁵ Equally, in Britain, geographer Jeremy Whitehand's work has highlighted the economic logics of building outside cities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the ways that it can stimulate housing development.Footnote ⁶ An exciting new research focus in the last five years has been on space, and this article develops this theme by exploring both the way that the edge of the city was imagined, and the way that it was physically manipulated and constructed.Footnote ⁷ This article highlights, then, the interplay of the material and the imaginary in producing place and space, in order to expand the claims of physical space on our understanding of the city – claims which even geographers have struggled to assert.Footnote ⁸ Without change to the physical environment, changes to the mental map of the urban would not have been possible: the cultural and the physical were in a dialectical relationship. Finally, that this process involves a German city in the early twentieth century means the article draws on some significant recent strands of German national history writing which investigate Wilhelmine modernity (and the place of the metropolis in it) in its own terms, rather than as part of the aetiology of National Socialism.Footnote ⁹ Rather than emphasizing a culture which viewed modernity as a catastrophe, and condemning the city as its agent, this article argues that the ways the city was manipulated as a physical and imagined environment actually highlight a keen awareness of the positive potential of both the metropolis and modernity in German culture.

The article has three sections. The first focuses on the models of the city's frontier prevalent in the municipal government and bureaucracy at the turn of the century, arguing that a model of the city as a bounded entity dominated in Munich. The second section shows how the city's governors and experts stepped over these boundaries, and planted ‘colonies’ of urban, administrative modernity in the space beyond, with the goal of growing the city outwards and structuring the future culture of the new suburbs. The final section examines the ways the space beyond the city's edge was imagined and narrated in contemporary journalism, arguing that the physical and the imaginary must be viewed as being involved in a dialectical process in shaping the modern city.

The urban frontier and the constrained city

Rather than exhibiting a retreat into anti-modern or pre-modern ways of thinking about the city and the space beyond it as a response to fin-de-siècle concerns about degeneration, Munich's planners and experts moved in just the opposite direction. In the 1890s, there was still a sense amongst city councillors and technocrats that the city was clearly limited and constrained. Perhaps the best evidence of this is the commission, beginning in 1892, of a ring of toll booths. These structures ringed the city, charging tolls on entering traffic. While the desire of a city corporation to raise revenue without inconvenience to its ratepayers may have been fairly common, the act of constructing a ring like this is important, as it exemplifies a model of the frontier between city and ‘not city’ as being fixed. Even despite twenty years of rapid growth of population and surface area, to invest so heavily in a ring of permanent structures implies faith that either the city's edge would stay where it was, or that whatever developed beyond it – suburbs, shanty towns, shunting yards, industry – would somehow belong to the category of ‘not city’.

The planning bureaucrats building this ring make a useful case study. It is important that we begin to regard the unlikely heroes of this border management as lively, dynamic human beings, struggling to understand the world and control it, and working with others to form a consensus about how to do so. They must not simply be seen as the anonymous agents of ‘modernization’ or any other impersonal historical force, because these people were working out ad hoc how to imagine and shape the city's edge.Footnote ¹⁰ One such was Hans Grässel, who started working for the City of Munich in 1890; his first commission as architect-in-charge was to build the ring of 14 toll booths.Footnote ¹¹ Clearly these structures were put up for a fairly specific primary purpose – the collection of money – but one should also recognize the mentality which underpinned them. To build a ring like this is to define a boundary, to mark the point of entry (and departure), contrasting that which is without with that which is within. It is erecting a sort of fence which hems the city economically and visually, posits a permanent ‘frontier’ and fixes a stable boundary for urban identity by placing buildings of some substance and permanence at the periphery. It is a very pre-modern physical, economic and administrative feature, which essentially rejects free trade capitalism, and presupposes charging the city's hinterland fees for using the city's regional service functions, such as markets. Grässel's next set of commissions was also typical of the pre-modern markers of the bounded city: five cemeteries, four Christian and one Jewish.

This idea of the fixed frontier was certainly a conscious aspect of municipal policy, and had underpinned the city's acquisition of vast tracts of land around the city in order to regulate growth. Munich suffered an acute housing shortage in the 1900s, reaching crisis-point in the economic depression and harsh winter of late 1908. The administration opened all its buildings to the homeless, and set about devising a longer-term response to the housing crisis. One of the many obstacles to the provision of housing was supply of land on which to build it. At one meeting, Munich's housing director, Schoener, berated the housing commission about how municipal policy was oriented towards retarding the growth of the city, to containing and limiting it, and restricting the supply of land for housing.Footnote ¹² Nineteenth-century thinking on the city was dominated by the metaphor of the organism. Nowhere was this truer than in Munich, where the city's edge was viewed as the organism's membrane: puncture it, and the organism was imperilled. Then in the early 1890s, the corporation announced a competition to zone and plan the entire city, old and (potentially) new. The prize for the best over-all design went to Karl Henrici, a disciple of the Austrian architectural critic Camillo Sitte, who insisted on conceiving of Munich as an organism with a fixed membrane, and in particular as a ‘fest zum Umland hin abgeschlossene Stadt’ – a city firmly shut off from its surrounding land.Footnote ¹³ This contrasts sharply with the vision of the edge of the city presented by, for example, James Hobrecht, municipal planner in Berlin in the 1860s. While Hobrecht could be as critical of the metropolis and the ‘masses’ that inhabited it as any cultural conservative, the plan he produced for Berlin in 1862 was intended to function as a limitless algorithm capable of producing an endlessly expandable, hygienic, capitalist city, over the next century.Footnote ¹⁴ It was this ‘algorithmic’ environment, though, that formed the focus for much turn-of-the-century Continental planning criticism.Footnote ¹⁵

The physical walls of German cities were largely pulled down by the mid-nineteenth century, but psychological walls remained. In Munich, housing director Schoener pointed out that the city had acquired substantial amounts of land surrounding it in the 15 years before 1908. This strategy was a common one for German municipal governments.Footnote ¹⁶ They bought it largely in order to manage land supply in the centre, keeping property profitable for the client classes which elected Liberal councils in Germany's hopelessly gerrymandered municipalities (only about 10 per cent of Munich's citizens had the vote).Footnote ¹⁷ Contemporary economists began to challenge the liberal consensus about property ownership, and argued increasingly that the functions of this form of land ownership around the city were not an example of the free market in operation, but acted to distort the market.Footnote ¹⁸ This de facto form of municipal-capitalist ‘green belt’ had been created, housing director Schoener complained, as a measure to control development, maintain land values, contain the town, and to stop the city drifting out unregulated into the countryside. He went on to argue that the time had come to use this land for development. He challenged his colleagues with the following observation: ‘I feel as if with this approach [using land ownership to control and stop development] we were stuck too firmly in the old conception of a city and city government with regard to land . . . in the corporation. The council chambers behave all too much as if they had bought to fulfil their own needs.’Footnote ¹⁹ He was right; they had. They had wanted to define and control the city, to promote the development of a valuable land portfolio. Yet at the same time that Grässel was building watchful huts at the border of the city, and Schoener was berating his colleagues for hemming the city in, a change was afoot. The town was enlarging itself; deliberately, self-consciously and methodically extending the urban, making the Großstadt ever größer.

The colonial project: territorial acquisition and colonial outposts

The possible forms which this enlargement could take were radically altering. Up until the 1890s, the enlargement of many European cities had been an essentially passive affair, from the city's perspective. Property speculators, industrialists, tram companies or the migrant poor in shanty towns would use land outside the city boundaries. Alternatively, small towns around large cities would grow until there was little or no space between them. In either case, when this occurred the state would often incorporate the area into the municipality in Continental Europe. This process was vigorous across Germany, starting around the turn of the century, and accelerating particularly after World War I. This process of incorporation was often against the fierce opposition of the city concerned, which would then have to provide such areas with water, schools, gas, hospitals, poor law provision and the like – an expensive business when incorporating a shanty town of huts populated by those at the very edge of society. However, around 1890–95, a shift began, in which incorporation in German cities was more proactively sought.Footnote ²⁰ The big rupture in Munich came in the 1900s, around the time Schoener was pleading for change. Just before his speech, projects started to be put in place by the City of Munich which not only anticipated, but encouraged, the growth of the city, and by 1913 the municipality was actively seeking the incorporation of the new industrial districts of Berg-am-Laim and Milbertshofen.

Again, we need to turn to the relatively prosaic business of urban administration to see this significant revolution in ways of treating the urban frontier. The city began by pitching facilities which it controlled or owned over the border, into the territory beyond, with the objective of enlarging the city, and enabling the administration to control the enlargement. I will call these facilities ‘colonies’, partly because it is a useful metaphor to crystallize ideas about space, the appropriation of resources and the projection of power, but also for another important reason: the concept is particularly suitable for Germany, and echoes German usage. In German, the word used between about 1870 and 1925 for a development of houses, artists or industry outside a city was a Kolonie. For developments of flats or houses during and after the Great War, the word Siedlung, or ‘settlement’, gradually gained prominence, and the people who lived in them were called Siedler, or settlers. The power of the metaphor was potent – for example, in 1909, Heinrich Sohnrey founded the journal Archiv für innere Kolonisation, which was typical of many resettlement interest groups which pushed the metaphors of settlement and colonization within Germany to the fore in contemporary debate.Footnote ²¹ The concept of a ‘colony’ in a perceived terra nullius beyond cities would not have seemed far-fetched to German-speakers. Two particular colonial outposts – amongst many – will serve here as illustration of how the city sought to overleap its frontiers in a physical sense, and reconfigure the world around it in dynamic, modern ways: a new gasworks, and a new school.

The growth of the gasworks is a useful example of how this process might take place. In 1902 it was clear that the city's old gasworks close to the city centre were no longer viable. Whereas average production in the 15 largest German cities per inhabitant was 75.4 m³ p.a., in Munich it was a mere 35.3 m³.Footnote ²² This was clearly a problem already, and would only get worse. Ries, director of the municipal gasworks, projected a growth in the population of Munich over the coming years of an unspecified amount, and demanded a gasworks ‘in the new style’ to cater for it. It was clear that practically, there was nowhere within the city to build it, yet, culturally, he seems to have felt it was a very urban thing. He argued that it should contribute to the existing Stadtbild (urban image, overall appearance of the city) and be ‘organically bound to it’, and at the same time would form a respectable focal point in the suburb he foresaw springing up around the works.Footnote ²³ He anticipated that, although the plant was to be built on what was then a green field site, the city would naturally expand around it, and he was excited about what that new sort of settlement would be like.

Significant to the current theme was the way the city acquired the land for the gasworks, and what it decided to build there. In August 1906, the corporation bought 17,392 hectares about a kilometre outside the city, on the Dachauerstraße in the parish of Moosach for the gasworks. The problem was that, naturally, the parish of Moosach did not want a gasworks for a city of half a million people built on its land; they refused planning permission. The city requested that the area in question be taken away from Moosach by the Bavarian government, and given to it, so its own planning regulations would apply, and this was done. The corporation duly granted itself permission to build its gasworks on someone else's territory, and broke its habit of opposing incorporation. An island of urban ‘Munich’ was created in rural Moosach. In 1912, the city requested the incorporation of the entire parish of Moosach, along with several others, and by the middle of 1913, this process was complete.Footnote ²⁴ The city had gone from regarding enlargement as a danger and an expense, to viewing it as a necessity – especially if its modernizing project were to be brought to completion.

In redefining the peripheries of the city, the nature of the city itself was called into question, and the relationship of the urban to the rural ‘other’ was recast. As Hatuka and Kallus argue in a recent analysis of urban bordermaking:

It is imperative to repersonalize these projects to emphasize that while ‘experts’ act within a framework, their personal choices and preferences do have an impact on outcomes. If we start looking at bureaucratic choices as part of the ‘contesting forces’ which direct the production of architecture in the struggle for power as stemming from the relationships of nameable human beings, rather than as simply the working through of bureaucratic modernization processes, we can see exposed the ways in which this physical frontier territory was being re-conceptualized. Internal wrangling amongst bureaucrats about the nature of these buildings are illustrative, for it was in projects like this that the boundaries of the city might be crossed, and the constrained city transformed into an expansive one.

The key feature of the design of the buildings in this particular ‘contest for space and territory’ (the gasworks) was the pervasive idea that they should visually constitute the focal point of a new suburb not yet existing. They were settlements to stimulate others to join them. This was certainly Ries' (the municipal gas director's) plan – he felt that this was a didactic gasworks. Planners and engineers worked together closely on the design for the new plant, sharing the assumption that it would attract settlement around it which would become the Gaswerkviertel, in the same way that the municipal abattoir which the corporation had built in the 1890s had unintentionally given its name to the Schlachthofviertel (‘Abattoir quarter’, the unfortunate name the area still has today), and after that to an organic addition to the town.Footnote ²⁶ Ries, the director of the gasworks, specified that ‘the objective [is] more a reasonable architectonic set of circumstances, and other advantages’, and concluded:

There is clearly an awareness here that by breaching the ‘membrane’ of the urban organism, its integrity could possibly be endangered. However, the intention seems to have been to create an ensemble with the potential visually to organize a new suburb as both something distinct from the main part of the city, and at the same time organically joined to it.

This industrial symbolism did not go uncontested. The whole complex was only a kilometre or so away from the Westfriedhof, the western cemetery built by Grässel between 1900 and 1904. A conflict erupted amongst the bureaucrats about whether this area should be visually characterized by the pre-modern symbols of the edge of the urban – the toll house and the cemetery – or modern ones: a large industrial complex producing gas. Grässel, who had designed the cemetery and toll booth, was at two heated meetings in spring of 1904 to discuss whether the gasometers should be moved further away from the cemetery or hidden by trees, and it seems that only he could have wanted either solution.Footnote ²⁸ His view of cemeteries has been characterized by George Mosse thus: ‘For Grässel, the collaboration of nature with architecture was essential for the edification of the soul and for that poetic sense so very necessary in the contemplation of death. Natural surroundings were not to be left alone, but instead were to be integrated into the orderly appearance of the cemetery.’Footnote ²⁹Bauamtmann (building officer) Wilhelm Bertsch took the gasworks directors' side, however, and his position as resident ‘expert’ at the Royal Building Commission seems to have carried the day, emphasizing urban technology over the pastoral idyll. He and the chief technicians, Ries and Hollweck, agreed that the model of the project ‘seems to prove that the whole impression (Gesamtbild) of the establishment is a friendly one. Even the gasometers, with their lightly constructed, modern execution, make an interesting, and in no way un-beautiful, set of objects.’Footnote ³⁰ In fact, Bertsch's proposal was to make the gasometers more visible, to refuse to hide them behind trees, and attach a clock to the water-tower in the project, so that the industrial development would become more, not less, visible in the area.Footnote ³¹ This solution was the one which was finally adopted. Thus the city planted an outpost in the countryside outside it; it marketed this outpost heavily as being modern, dynamic and forward-thinking; then ensured that it would be visible through the clock and the absence of trees; and designed it to be a symbol of the city's service provision (Leistungsverwaltung) which would visually organize a projected new suburb. The city had, in a sense, created a colony, separate from itself, to exploit and civilize the land beyond its boundaries, with the ultimate goal of sending settlers there.

This contest, in which the genteel ‘border’ architecture of cemetery and toll booth was pitched against the potent urban, industrial and technical symbol of the gasworks in a dispute about what the visual emphases of the expanding city should be, shows a clear rejection of the idea that the metropolis as such was a cultural catastrophe. In this, councillors and technocrats evidenced their rejection of anti-modern, bucolic fantasies about a hypothetical ‘rural idyll’. And they did this by executing real projects of spatial transformation to imprint this conviction on the physical landscape.

Although some, like Hans Grässel, a founder member of the Bund Heimatschutz, might quibble with the details in this particular case, he was not at all opposed to the wider process of planting ‘colonies of modernity’ in the countryside. Through his school buildings, he engaged in the impetus to grow the city outwards. Grässel became a figure of substantial renown both in Germany and beyond as the main architect of Munich's huge school-building programme of the 1900s. Grässel's opinions about the role of the school as the organizing visual element in a new or developing suburb show that he was in basic agreement with Ries and Bertsch about the need to step over the urban border, and the need to control and manipulate what lay beyond it. In an essay of 1915, he stressed:

This theme had already been picked up, with respect to Munich's school-building policy, by a national technical journal, Das Schulhaus. Discussing the school on Fürstenriederstraße, built by Grässel between 1901 and 1904, the journal described the placement of the school as being in open countryside.Footnote ³³ As the Schulhaus article explained, the parish of Laim had been incorporated into the municipality of Munich in 1900, as some of its area had been settled by industry on the Munich borders. However, the parish was a large one, and the whole area had been transferred to Munich's governance, including large stretches of agricultural land. Grässel was faced with a complicated situation. He was compelled by his ideology of Gliederung – the idea that every building should form a continuous link with the environment in which it stood, according to the principles of Camillo Sitte and the Bund Heimatschutz – to reflect the rural nature of the site in the building. But as the Schulhaus article acknowledged, the nature of the site was dual:

One wonders why the city built this school at all, given there was no settlement around it to use it. The only satisfactory answer is that the municipality predicted a future demand, and built, as it were, to create and manage it, as Grässel described above. The Fürstenriederstraße school was a staging post for urban expansion, and, just like the gasworks, it was intended to place the municipality as visually and functionally central to that growth. First, the municipality would plan for and encourage enlargement by placing outposts of municipal activity in ‘virgin territory’. Secondly, the city administration would design itself into that extension, to become a visual still point in the turning world of urban expansion. Thirdly, these staging posts were all potent physical presences for key features of the modern state and modern society – not in any metaphorical way, but a literal one. And this school was an imposing structure, some eight storeys high. Dozens of projects like this were completed around the city. Schools, gasworks, old people's homes, housing estates, tram depots and welfare offices do not allude to the key features of governmental modernity or urban administration; they are those features. The city's experts and administrators projected many such outposts into the rural landscape around them. Munich was certainly not alone in this, either within Germany or beyond. The municipality's leaders and technocrats aligned themselves with the enlargement of the Großstadt, and agitated for a dynamic municipal commitment to it, to be evidenced within it. But while this demonstrates a keen desire and robust strategy to step over the border, and into the world beyond, it begs questions about how those new worlds were imagined, rather than occupied. It is to those which I will now turn.

The dysfunctional countryside and the useful city

While the school and gasworks clearly illustrate the importance of physically crossing borders, and the ‘colonial’ outposts show an expansive vision of the urban, modernizing project, they do not indicate the ways in which contemporaries constructed the rural ‘other’ as an imaginative realm. It is an objective of this article to highlight the ways in which the physical manipulation of space exists in relationship with the cultural ways it is discussed. These projects do not suggest, on their own, what sort of environment Germans in the first decades of the century thought these facilities were being built in. Much literature assumes a dichotomy in German cultural discourse between what Zimmermann and Reulecke have caricatured as ‘city as Moloch, countryside as source of strength’.Footnote ³⁵ This simplistic contrast (and Zimmermann and Reulecke are playing on its simplisticness) can be challenged by examining not just the ways the municipal authorities managed rural land acquisition in the spurt of industrialization during the war, but in the ways this management was related to the public through the metaphors deployed by journalists. The particular focus here will be on the construction of an industrial complex by Krupp in the countryside beyond the city, and how this world was narrated and characterized in the journalism of the time.

Up until 1914, industrial activities had been woven into the fabric of the city in a way which did not spatially segregate urban functions.Footnote ³⁶ However, the large-scale factories developed on the outskirts of German cities during the war were designed primarily around Fordist models of efficiency of production, and were spatially segregated from other urban functions. Thus they were built on ‘green field sites’, well outside the city. The war damaged the Munich economy greatly, curtailing tourism and luxury goods production. So when the Reich government and Krupp announced the establishment of a large munitions factory just outside the city, there was substantial excitement. The joy at the decision in May 1916 to build the ordnance works in the north of Munich was not, however, primarily an economic one. When Krupp announced they would buy land to the north of the city, the municipality's immediate response was to buy land there too. The city bought its plots strategically (and many newspaper reports confirm this strategic consciousness), so that the city's land divided the Krupp land, which would compel Krupp to negotiate with the corporation in the use of the area.Footnote ³⁷ It also allowed the municipality to develop an early industrial estate (at a similar time, though on a smaller scale, to the development of those in Britain, at Trafford Park in Manchester and Wembley Park in London). To encourage such development there, the municipal government announced the construction of express tram links to the sites, and the provision of housing for the first foremen who were coming from the Ruhr.

However, it is the way that this transformation was narrated which is of primary interest. There was not a single negative reaction in the major Munich newspapers. But what is more interesting are the metaphors and style of argument used about the countryside – the world beyond the city limits. Munich's largest circulation daily (and one of the most important German newspapers of the time), the Münchner Neueste Nachrichten, led on the front page with a description of the transformation from the rural and the idyllic to the industrial and urban. The article, entitled ‘A tour round the Munich Krupp area of the future’, started by describing a bounded city: the Jewish cemetery by Grässel, and his toll house – two potent pre-modern symbols of urban frontiers. Beyond them lay ‘an idyllic fantasy, open fields, lush greenery, all a long way from the war, where we can enjoy the poetry of the country lane’.Footnote ³⁸ But if one carries on to Alt Freimann, the article exalted: ‘you stand in the crucible of the destiny of Munich (im Brennpunkt des Münchener Zukunftslandes), which is suddenly, along with the name Krupp, on everyone's lips. Now you stand in the Munich-Freimann Industrial Estate! [emphasis in original]’Footnote ³⁹ The author went on to emphasize the healthy contrast between the developments which were taking place there with the private garden suburb which had been built adjacent to this land before the war. These houses were described as a Gartenkolonie – a garden colony. This particular Kolonie had failed – as so many similar projects did – because of the price of houses and remoteness. Already, then, there was an idea that this area was not succeeding – it was not ‘useful’. From the Kolonie, there was a view which would have been the same in an eighteenth-century landscape, and the article lists all the Elysian details of the environment. It laid especial emphasis on the derelict pig farm, which had gone bankrupt before the war – perhaps another symbol of the ‘failure’ of the countryside. It concluded: ‘This is the land that the City of Munich has bought to secure the future development of the city. Here it will sow a special seed, from which we anticipate a distant, rich harvest, rich enough perhaps to transform the entire structure of our city from the very bottom up.’Footnote ⁴⁰ The overall tone in this article is that the countryside is pretty, but redundant. The municipality, through its town planning policies, would colonize it and make it useful – but the fruit of the colony would be industrial, not agricultural.

In a later article, another journalist pointed out another type of restructuring which was hoped for from the plant and the municipal land purchases: ‘Alongside the economic significance to Munich of the industrial plans for the land around Freimann, there is a greater, but perhaps slower, influence we can expect, namely on the architectural formation and re-formation (bauliche Gestaltung und Umgestaltung) of the city.’Footnote ⁴¹ The article celebrated the booming industry of the north of Munich, mentioning the Rapp Motorenwerke, which was doubling its work-force, and was about to change its name to the one we are more familiar with: BMW. Moreover, the Münchner Neueste Nachrichten offered a prognosis for the future, and placed an industrial vision at the heart of it:

So it seems that the over-arching metaphorical structure of the discussion of this industrial colony in the countryside was that the development, by eventually including industry in the Stadtbild, brought the city closer to an urban ideal. Furthermore, the lack of such a visual and economic presence in the fabric of the metropolis was a failure of some sort.Footnote ⁴³ This way of envisioning the city seems to be a significant statement of affection for or acceptance of the phenomena of modernity by an organ of the cultural mainstream. The presentation of the countryside by these journalists as an unproductive void beyond the urban, and the focus by urban technocrats on driving the city outwards and focusing growth on symbols of the modern, rational, governmental project, suggest a German culture very much at home with modernity.

This pro-urban, anti-rural strand in German culture was not confined to planners or journalists: it was far more widespread, and can be illustrated by debates about food during the war. This critique of the countryside mirrors the trend of alienation between city and country over food supplies which had been growing since the 1880s. If anything, rather than a nostalgic yearning for some notional pre-war consensus between town and country, the sense of alienation from any pre-modern affinity with the rural hinterland grew during the years 1914–23. Cities in the period before rapid motor transport, pasteurization and refrigeration could suffer painful reminders of their intimate dependency on the agricultural land immediately around them. Since the SPD had risen to prominence in the 1890s, the issue of agricultural protectionism was a central one in Germany for the working classes.

By 1917, the British blockade of German ports had begun to bite. Recent studies of both Berlin and Vienna during the war have shown that rather than any sort of popular yearning for, or affinity with, the countryside, urban Germans and Austrians focused on their rural cousins as a major obstacle to national well-being, for their perceived exploitation of food shortages for financial gain.Footnote ⁴⁴ The war drew into sharp relief a fundamental re-orientation of political discourse in German-speaking Europe, parallel to the way journalists narrated the ‘conquest’ of the country by urban industrial settlement. By the middle of the war, when this industrial estate was being built, it was not possible for political elites to appeal rhetorically to a primordial compact between city and land; rather, the situation was one in which urbanites were already confident about rejecting the rural in a variety of ways. The mainstream of those in charge of shaping cities (planners and engineers), those in charge of narrating them (journalists) and those who lived in them, were repeatedly describing the countryside as the problem, and the city as the solution.