Idyll and Ideology

Idyll and Ideology
Hermann Mattern and the
Landscape to Live In
Lars Hopstock

3
This first English-language biography of Hermann
Mattern (1902–1971), one of Germany’s principal
twentieth- century landscape architects, critically
assesses the significance of his organicist-functionalist
position while offering a new reading of
German garden and landscape culture during his
lifetime. While focusing on the idiosyncrasies of
a single man, the biography aims to contribute to
a more holistic understanding of landscape- related
modernism in general – beyond the narrow limits
of garden history, but without neglecting the
specificities of the intellectual culture of landscape
architecture. Mattern embodies several themes
of the German landscape discourse and the central
ambivalence of his generation: a life between the
artistic avant-garde of the 1920s and the pitfalls
of an allegedly apolitical career under the Nazi
regime and in the postwar period. Based on comprehensive
archival research, Hopstock’s richly
illustrated study uncovers professional networks,
discourses and rivalries that shaped the profession
of landscape architecture in Germany during its
formative decades.

Content
7
Foreword
Marc Treib
219
‘Politically Unsound’:
Mattern and the Nazis
11
15
Preface
Introduction
231
‘Obsolete Individualism’:
The Killesberg Park Between Reverence
and Rejection
23
71
83
Tendencies in
Modern Garden Art
The Architectonic and
the Landscape Modes
c. 1895–1933
Part I
Early Influences
1902–c. 1930
Learning to See:
A Wandervogel Youth in the Land of Fables
Becoming a Landscape Architect
in Germany in the 1920s
261
283
335
349
Working Towards the Führer (?):
Mattern’s War Career
Atmosphere of Departure and
Disillusionment: Postwar Art and Life
Part III
The New Landscape
Consciousness
c. 1950–1971
The ‘Landscape for Living’ and
Its Limits of Resilience
International Orientation and
Retrospection: The Later Years
99
121
Confidante and Counterpart:
Herta Hammerbacher
Bauhaus, Expressionism and the Empathic:
Early Influences and the Golden Twenties
367
Epilogue
‘Freedom within
Limitations’
153
Tête-à-Tête with Flora:
Karl Foerster and the New Take on Plants
Part II
Continuities Across
Systems
1927–c. 1960
384
390
391
396
416
Appendix
Glossary
Acronyms
Index
Bibliography
Imprint
177
Genesis of the New Landschaftlichkeit:
The ‘Bornim’ Label in the Context of
Interwar Garden Design
5

Introduction
Significance and research questions
The common knowledge about Hermann Mattern
is usually subsumed by the term Bornimer Schule –
Bornim School, probably a self-proclamation –
which refers to a group of landscape architects and
horticulturists active in Bornim near Potsdam who
were particularly influential with their notions of
modern garden design as developed around 1930. 1
For Mattern, the following aspects are widely
considered as established facts: an ‘organic’ (curvilinear)
formal language with an extensive use of
mounds for space-making, usually mentioned in
the same breath as his fellow landscape architect
and first wife Herta Hammerbacher’s (1900–1985)
preference for hollows; informal, vegetation-based
design concepts, inspired by the breeding achievements
of his business partner Karl Foerster (1874–
1970); a liberal stance, opposed to the Nazi regime;
progressive concepts for landscape planning; and
formative personal connections with the architect
Hans Scharoun (1893–1972). This canon has been
repeatedly referred to and often disseminated
without the consultation of primary sources, which
has led to the perpetuation of certain characteristics
and to a broad-brush image of this group
of professionals. This, and the view of Mattern as
‘artist without a theory’ and progressive humanist,
has prevented a differentiated and critical analysis
from being developed.
In 1982, an exhibition about Mattern was held
at Berlin’s Arts Council Akademie der Künste, the
successor to the Prussian Academy of Arts. This was
one of the first such events dedicated solely to one
twentieth-century garden designer. The exhibition
was accompanied by a catalogue entitled Hermann
Mattern: Gärten, Gartenlandschaften, Häuser, which
for thirty years remained the only monograph
about him. It was intended as an initial recollection
of memories and comprised a tentative approach
to reviewing his central ideas, without academic
pretensions, while paying tribute to the wide scope
of his work. Until then, most knowledge about
Mattern’s life was passed on by word-of-mouth.
Since the mid-1990s a small number of academic
papers further explored aspects of his life and
work, often with a focus on his ideo logical stance.
Mattern has for a long time been presented
as a showcase liberal. However, after more information
emerged about his involvement with
the regime, in particular, with the Organisation
Todt (OT), the civil and military engineering
group that represented one of the power centres
15

of the Nazi state, the feeling grew that there was
more to be discovered. 2 This did not so much
affect his ideological standing, which had been
convincingly analysed and generally found to
be non-Nazi. Instead, the most obvious research
question sought a clarification of Mattern’s actual
relationship with the regime in functional terms.
In addressing this, his sometimes alluded-to, yet
never widely recognised, willingness to cooperate
emerges now more clearly than ever before.
Another research question regards the generally
vague conception of modernism in garden
design, something that has been described as a
mere ‘side-track’ of twentieth-century landscape
architecture. 3 It has even been stated that ‘[i] t is
commonly held that there was no modernist
movement in German landscape architecture’. 4
The line of reasoning on which such assess ments
was based, however, reveals a general lack of
research and a reductionist understanding of
modernism itself. Therefore, one aim of the present
study is a clarification of how to ask the question
in the first place. How did changing social conditions
and changing cultural concepts find expression
in domestic and public garden design? In view
of the turn towards question of the landscape,
how did the profession that we today refer to as
landscape architecture transfer its handed-down
body of knowledge from the garden onto the
landscape? What notion of a garden could be
discussed together with the artistic avant-garde
or in the context of the Bauhaus? What was the
garden equivalent to the architectural movement
of Neues Bauen? Or did garden design rather
follow a Freudian kind of compensatory mechanism
to create in its ‘subdued lushness’ an enthralling
complement to the ‘austerity of the built’,
as one contemporary observer put it? 5 Regarding
these questions, Mattern and the other landscape
architects surrounding the Foerster nursery in
the village of Bornim – which I will refer to as
‘Bornimers’– are observed sceptically, as a result
of their perceived romanticism, and have even
been written-off as ‘middle-of-the-road’ modernists.
6 However, this assessment was based on facile
aesthetic judgements and often on a wildly questionable
equation of the geometric with the progressive.
Concerning the artistic avant-garde, while
a series of impressive, often unbuilt examples has
been presented in the literature, today the search
for a modern garden style in the sense of a ‘new
building style’, as proclaimed in 1927 by Walter
Curt Behrendt, seems anachronistic; so many
other factors have come into view beyond formaesthetic
questions, and in the light of discourses
in the humanities there is no way one can avoid a
multi- perspectival reflection, moving between the
poles of social history and history of ideas. 7 The
advantage someone studying Hermann Mattern
has is that Mattern consciously and carefully verbalised
the ideas on which his designs – concrete
spatial artefacts – were based, and that he was
self-reflective. Furthermore, there is a great wealth
of visual material to analyse. This visual part of
his legacy was intentionally produced to impart
his ideas by visual means – first of all by means of
photographs, skilfully taken by the photographer
Beate zur Nedden, Mattern’s second wife. For
good reasons, German garden and landscape history
has, to a large extent, invested in dealing with
ideological-political questions; they continue to
be dominant in the present text. However, aspects
of formal-spatial evolution and artistic and designerly
notions have, in the past, not been addressed
with the same scholarly rigour. If form and idea,
design vocabulary and intention are understood as
mutually dependent and design is acknowledged
as a medium of knowledge production, the significance
of a designer can only be evaluated appropriately
when considering an artefact as the formal
expression of ideas and cultural influences. With
this qualification, in the context of biographical
research a formal analysis of a work is meaningful.
After the question of Mattern’s relation with
the Nazi regime and the unsolved relationship
of landscape architecture to ‘modernism’ in general,
a third major subject to be considered is the field
of the history of the profession, notably its education.
While the chronology is fairly clear, and records
the beginnings of the university curriculum
for landscape architects in 1929 at the Berlin College
of Agriculture, as well as the foundation dates
of other colleges after the war, the teaching content
has not yet been systematically investigated. 8
As a teacher at two of the few postwar universitylevel
courses for landscape architecture, Mattern
had a prominent role in this field. On top of this,
he was also responsible for the establishment of
the only course ever to be taught at a German art
college, at Kassel immediately after the war. This
gains a particular significance through Mattern’s
introduction of Bauhaus ideas into the sphere
of landscape architecture education, something
that has never been clearly illuminated. 9
16 Introduction

The scope and structure of this book
The temporal foci of the main parts below become
comprehensible by knowing more about the
available sources. In this regard, some surprises
were waiting along the way. The archival material
presented a much richer source than initially
expected. This was especially true for correspondence
from the period of the Nazi regime, disclosing
debates behind the scenes that explained
aspects of the profession’s history as yet not so
clearly understood. The relevance of findings from
oral history, which certainly complemented the
author’s image of Mattern’s character, paled in
contrast to the significance of archival material.
Another change in focus was due to the period
from which this material originated. Correspondingly,
a temporal focus emerged on the period
1933–45. That Mattern’s inspiration in his youth
appeared formative for his development added
a second emphasis on the first half of Mattern’s
life. For this period, never-before analysed private
correspondence brought to light a wealth of detail
that should encourage future researchers to look
further into other aspects that have merely been
touched on in the present text. This is also true for
his artistic work as a whole, of which this book
presents only a tiny fraction. Mattern’s influence
in the postwar period could be delineated with
considerable breadth, but some developments
remain to be explored more in depth.
Due to the lack of publications in English
that might provide such a context, this text starts
by recapitulating some of the main developments
and dominant individual positions in German
twentieth- century garden history, upon which
the general lines of reasoning are then launched.
This first part also provides an introduction to
the relevant notions and personalities that allows
for a tighter organisation of later chapters and
com prises a cursory classification of Mattern’s
and Hammer bacher’s early work in form-histori
cal terms. The timeframe from the late nineteenth-century
reforms to the period around
WWII was chosen to show the development of
the geometric ideal that prevailed at the times that
Mattern’s design approach was defined. The text
deals with questions of ideology but tries to link
these with questions of form. The latter, as will
become obvious, are all-encompassing in garden
history; many professional debates referred in some
way to the two poles of a landscape-like naturalism
(landschaftlich) and a geometric, architectonic style.
This introduction necessarily had to draw upon
primary literature, especially the journal Gartenkunst
which was the most important publication
for practicing landscape architects at the time. 10
The profound changes that took place after 1933
will be briefly delineated, but the Nazi era will
be dealt with later in greater detail in the chapter
focusing on Mattern’s experiences in the period.
For different chapters, different approaches
have consciously been chosen, alternating between
the explorative and more straight-forward historical
descriptions of particular occurrences. In some
cases, the relevance of the subject to Mattern is not
made explicit, but should reveal itself indirectly.
The historiography is complemented by occasional
case studies, and all images should be understood
as a separate, essential layer of meaning, not always
entirely translated into text.
For a complete list of works the reader is
kindly referred to Vroni Heinrich’s biography
of Mattern, which is available online, and compare
its extensive annex with the bibliography in this
book, which includes varied new sources. 11
The sources
Mattern’s estate is distributed across different
locations. Firstly, there is his work – drawings as
well as photographs of projects – which is kept
at the Museum of Architecture at Berlin, fittingly
located in a Scharoun-designed, run-down
extension to the TU’s faculty of architecture at
Ernst-Reuter- Platz. The online database lists over
650 projects for Hermann Mattern, comprising
well over 6,500 single files tagged with his name,
though it has to be considered that this overlaps
with Hammer bacher-related fonds for their
collaboration over several years. In comparison,
the estate of his colleague Walter Rossow at the
Akademie der Künste, considered as an extensive
collection, holds 2,500 plan drawings. Secondly,
the property of his university chair went into the
possession of the University Archive of the Technical
University of Berlin, which forms a department
within the main university library but is kept
in a different building. This part of the Mattern
fonds were first organised only after the main part
of my research had been completed, so references
mostly refer to documents without inventory
numbers (e. g., ‘folder 1’).
Part of Mattern’s private and professional
legacy was handed over by his widow to her friend
Vroni Heinrich, a former student of Mattern’s,
17

some four or five decades ago. 12 Finally, Mattern’s
daughter also kept parts of his property when she
took over his Bavarian house, where, for example,
his private book collection remains unchanged,
now in the possession of a grandson of Mattern’s. 13
The estate of Hans Scharoun unexpectedly contained
very little correspondence.
The main body of sources for the time of
Mattern’s youth and the start of his career during
the Weimar Republic were found in the form of
a shoebox filled with hundreds of letters written
by Mattern between October 1926 and July 1927,
when he lived in Magdeburg, where he had his
first employment at the city’s parks and gardens
department. These letters were all addressed to
his beloved Herta Hammerbacher. The two were
writing on a daily basis, occasionally sending two
letters in a single day, and, as they are written
in confidence, their discovery represented a biographic
historian’s holy grail. Unfortunately,
Hammer bacher’s corresponding letters are lost.
Mattern’s letters were handed to the university
archive by Vroni Heinrich, who appears to hold
parts of this correspondence privately. 14 The private
communication between Seifert and Mattern,
as well as the circulars of the landscape advocates,
provide details about Mattern’s occupation under
the Nazi regime; as will be shown, he owed his
stabilising repute of irreproachability in these years
to strong interventions made by Seifert. Crucial
insights were also gained from looking at correspondence
kept in the estate of landscape architect
Heinrich Friedrich Wiepking.
With the intention to get first-hand impressions
and to document surviving projects, a
series of field trips were made. Apart from sites
at Berlin and Potsdam, these field trips covered
sites in Cologne, Étampes (France), Greimharting
(the family property), Helmstedt, Hofgeismar
and surroundings, Kassel, Magdeburg, Paris and
Stuttgart. Material was not always found, and often
projects had not survived. Further archives were
visited in Berlin, Freising, Munich, Osnabrück,
Stuttgart, Wiesbaden and Magdeburg.
After the downfall of the Nazi regime, many
Germans had good reasons to clean their attics.
After Mattern’s death in 1971, his widow would
not have missed the opportunity to go through her
husband’s effects to decide which letters to give
to the archive and which to hide or destroy. The
same will be true for the personal correspondence
consulted in other estates. We simply cannot say
how objective archival fonds are. Good reputations
want to be kept untarnished and missing material
has as much potential to mislead an interpretation
as manipulated material. The latter also has to be
considered, for in times of active censorship even
private letters had to be worded carefully – in
particular if surveillance was likely. In addition to
this, in Mattern we are also dealing with a person
of both considerable pride and considerable wit,
so particular precaution is advised.
Literature overview
Mostly with the help of his second wife Beate,
Mattern produced the following three monographs:
Freiheit in Grenzen (1938) and Gärten und
Gartenlandschaften (1960), both documenting his
work, and the environmentalist pamphlet Gras
darf nicht mehr wachsen (1964). Die Wohnlandschaft
(1950), a book Mattern edited, contains a seminal
essay, and his lecture Flurlandschaft was published
together with Ernst May’s lecture Stadtlandschaft
(1964). 15 Besides this he wrote a vast number of
articles and chapters of varying quality and significance.
Prior to 1945 he published predominantly
in the journals Gartenkunst and Gartenschönheit;
after 1945 in the Werkbund journal baukunst und
werkform (in the first editions he is listed as advisor
to the editor Alfons Leitl), the garden and landscape
journals Garten und Landschaft (the postwar
successor of Gartenkunst) and Pflanze und Garten
(as its co-publisher), since 1970 known as Grün.
In the relationship between landscape architecture
and architectural history it can generally
be observed that the landscape profession’s contribution
is not always appropriately valued. Many
monographs about architects who collaborated
with Mattern do not mention him appropriately;
occasionally he is referred to as an ‘architect’. A
noteworthy exception are the writings about Hans
Scharoun (1893–1972) by Peter Blundell Jones
(1949–2016), who even suggested a fundamental
influence Mattern may have had on the development
of Scharoun’s organic architecture and
consideration of the terrain. 16 Other authors have
dismissed Mattern’s role too easily. 17
It should be noted that the published sources
referred to in the following paragraphs are often
low-budget, grey literature that has not received
professional editing and will be difficult to find
outside Germany.
A special situation emerges from the fact
that a great share of the biographic writing about
18 Introduction

Mattern has been produced by one former student
and admirer of his, the landscape architect and
librarian at Mattern’s departmental library, Vroni
Heinrich, who enjoyed the trust of Mattern’s
widow Beate Maltusch, in the following referred
to by her maiden name, zur Nedden. 18 Heinrich’s
writings include an entry in the Chicago Botanic
Garden’s Encyclopedia of Gardens, which is to
date the only general introduction to Mattern
in English, and she also worked on the already
mentioned exhibition and catalogue of 1982. 19
Thanks to her friendship with Beate zur Nedden,
Heinrich has been given many private documents,
parts of which she gave to the University Archive
at the TU Berlin. On the one hand, her writings
bear witness to a deep understanding of Mattern’s
thinking and also draw attention to zur Nedden’s
achievements which would otherwise be concealed.
On the other hand, her work clearly
betrays an apologetic bias. What is more, she freely
admits to relying heavily on zur Nedden’s accounts
without checking other sources, but completely
fails to address the obvious potential pitfalls. 20
One stark example shall suffice: even though
Mattern’s membership in the National Socialist
German Worker’s Party (NSDAP) is documented
on easily accessible microfiches in the Federal
Archive, Heinrich claims in all her publications
that he did not join the party, simply because this
was what zur Nedden had always said. 21 Heinrich
also distorts quotes by quoting selectively or
suggesting interpretations for which there is no
evidence. Such shortcomings together with the
inaccessibility of part of the estate certainly were
a dis advantage for the academic engagement with
the phenomenon of Mattern in the past. Heinrich’s
long-awaited monograph was published in December
2012 (revised edition 2013). 22 It provided
rich material, as well as a catalogue raisonné,
which helped evaluate my own findings.
The greatest part of the present study relies
on a literature review conducted in the context
of the PhD thesis completed in 2015, upon which
the text is based.
In the context of twentieth-century German
garden history, the first names that spring to mind
are those of Gert Gröning (emeritus of Berlin’s
University of Arts) and that of one of his students,
Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn (emeritus of the University
of Hanover). 23 They are amongst the very
few German garden historians to regularly publish
in English and originally defined themselves with
a ‘social science-oriented approach to open space
planning’ (‘sozialwissenschaftliche Freiraumplanung’),
based on a materialist conception of history. This
should be seen in the context of Gröning’s academic
initiation at the University of Hanover
during the late 1970s, when sociology was a new
and upcoming discipline upon which many hopes
were set, which he exposed in an insightful essay
(2010). Back then, a re discovery of the recently
deceased founder of the school Heinrich Friedrich
Wiepking’s past as a Nazi demagogue by a new,
critical generation of students shocked the professional
world. Gröning is known as a pioneer
in discussing retrogressive ideological tradition
lines in connection with the racist notion of the
Nordic peoples’ special relationship to nature.
He and Wolschke-Bulmahn drew attention to the
edited-out, anti-democratic past of fashionable,
allegedly new concepts such as the Naturgarten
of the 1980s, and to the profession’s interconnection
with the Nazi regime’s systems of power.
With their sometimes feverish emphasis on moral
questions, however, their work has also been
criticised for its supposedly selective perspective
and for an exaggerated scepticism regarding the
ideological standing of garden designers and artists
who are generally presented as humanists, such
as Karl Foerster. 24 At the same time, they considerably
widened the perspective of garden history
research in Germany. While this, and the wealth
of sources they have drawn attention to, have also
contributed to the scope of the present text, in
the light of Mattern’s role in the profession, he is
con spicuously underrepresented in their writing. 25
The reason may lie in the authors’ difficulties in
pinning down Mattern with their categories of
progressive versus conservative, as well as in their
general suspicion towards neo-romanticism and
search for landscape-relatedness, which is particularly
palpable in Wolschke-Bulmahn’s work. 26
Another circle in which important research
has been completed is associated with the human
geographer Ulrich Eisel (emeritus of TU Berlin)
and the theoretical ecologist Ludwig Trepl (1946–
2016, TU Munich) who almost exclusively published
in German. These scholars stand for a more
constructivist approach and, despite, or perhaps, as
a result of largely shunning the standard academic
culture of peer-reviewed journals, have been rather
influential within German academic landscape
architecture. 27 Dealing with the history of ideas
they hardly address questions of contemporary
19

history, nor do they analyse specific designs. Taking
into account the whole body of literature addressing
Mattern, the Eisel- and Trepl-associated Stefan
Körner (University of Kassel) has produced the
most comprehensive (and complicated) analysis of
Mattern’s thinking, which served as an inspiration
for this text. 28
Several theses have been dedicated to landscape
aspects of the autobahn projects of the 1930s
with relevance for research about Mattern, 29 and
some monographs about other twentieth-century
garden designers like those on Mattern’s colleagues
Walter Funcke, Hermann Göritz and Alwin
Seifert also include a few lines about Mattern,
although mainly restricted to the Nazi years or
the context of his working relationship with Karl
Foerster’s nursery firm. 30 Sonja Dümpelmann,
for example in her Flights of Imagination (2014),
has also added some facets to our understanding
of Mattern and Hammerbacher. One doctoral
dissertation thesis to be gratefully referred to is the
one published in 2001 by Jeong-Hi Go on Herta
Hammerbacher, who was married to Mattern
between 1928 and 1935. 31 It drew the author’s
attention to some essential sources and helped
contrast Mattern’s position with that of his first
wife. With regard to Mattern’s role during the
postwar decades, Andrea Koenecke has produced
a valuable contribution with her dissertation thesis
on Walter Rossow. 32 Finally, the March 2003 edition
of Stadt+Grün should also be referred to, as it
was dedicated to the 100th birthdays of Mattern
and his contemporary Reinhold Lingner, with
some well-researched contributions. 33 Last but not
least, complemented later by Clemens Alexander
Wimmer’s related work, Swantje Duthweiler’s
comprehensive study on trends of plant use in
Germany between 1900 and 1945 has helped contextualise
Mattern’s and his firm’s planting style. 34
Merely weeks before this book went into print,
Wimmer published the first comprehensive
Karl Foerster biography. He kindly made some
last-minute corrections to my book file. 35
Questions of language
One peculiarity of the present text is its dealing
with entirely German sources. Sentences in German,
and Mattern’s in particular, can be extremely
long; in the interest of legibility, the longest sentences
have been split up into shorter sentences in
their translation. Quotes with a length above two
lines in the original single- column manuscript
have been indented. Unless stated otherwise,
emphasis in quotes is found in the original source.
All quotes from German sources translated by the
author are given in footnotes, unless shorter than
a full sentence. German texts retain their original
orthography (e. g. ‘daß’ instead of ‘dass’).
The topic deals with a German context not
merely in a philological sense, but also a cultural
one. Despite a long history of intense international
exchange in garden design, key terms with a
decidedly German context do exist. It is therefore
necessary to present the most important German
expressions and explain how they have been
translated into English – or the reasons for not
doing so. Thus, by recommendation of re viewers,
a short glossary has been compiled. The term
Landschaft has been discussed on many occasions,
and the discourse of recent years suggest that its
meaning is increasingly in flux. Without going into
detail, it shall be mentioned that the author’s own
studies were strongly defined by this discourse
and the debate between proponents of culturalhistorical
(landscape as culturally defined and
aesthetically experienced), sociological-materialist
(landscape experience defined by social factors
and as politically employed term) and scientistic
materialist perspectives (landscape as measurable
environment). It must however be stressed that a
modern perspective cannot ignore certain socioconstructivism;
in everyday language as much
as in the sphere of landscape architecture, the
adjectival term landschaftlich is strongly connected
with a cultural and aesthetic semantic field that is
at least partly specific to the German context. This
explains why the term landschaftlich is typically
left untranslated in the text; a translation would
inevitably reduce its meaning.
For the Bornimers, their designs tried to
respect the character of the existing landscape as
much as express human nature; it was one of the
main incentives for this research project to understand
Mattern and Hammerbacher’s personal
employment of the term. 36 Considered together,
all research questions set out above delineate another,
general underlying ambition: to contribute
to a more holistic understanding of landscaperelated
aspects of twentieth-century culture and
to produce a piece of historiographical writing
that may be of value to readers beyond the narrow
limits of garden history, without neglecting the
specificities of the intellectual culture of landscape
architecture.
20 Introduction

1 See glossary for a definition of
‘Bornim School’. More about this
in the chapter on Karl Foerster,
p. 151ff.
2 The first author clearly
addressing Mattern’s willingness
to cooperate with the OT was
Reitsam (2003).
3 Poblotzki 2003: 17.
4 Ibid.
5 Heuss 1928: 50.
6 See for example the popular
monograph by Mader 1999
(102–05; see also the chapter
heading on p. 100).
7 For impressive avant-garde
examples see: Wolschke-Bulmahn
2006, who also writes that the
avant-garde was defined by the
self-conception of the right angle
(13–14). For another example
that presents almost exclusively
geometric gardens as modernist
see: Bacher 1995.
8 For a comprehensive overview
of the beginnings of academic
garden design teaching in Germany
in English, see: Hopstock
2022a; Hopstock 2022b.
9 The author has published
a short paper about this topic
( Hopstock 2012).
10 Gartenkunst was edited by
the Deutsche Gesellschaft für
Gartenkunst e. V. (German Society
for Garden Art, DGfG), and unlike
today, was the journal focusing on
all matters of the profession, including
garden history, questions
of urban planning and contemporary
garden design. During the
1920s, the title was Gartenkunst,
Monatsschrift für Gartenkunst und
verwandte Gebiete (‘Garden Art,
monthly for garden art and related
fields’). In the 1930s the name
changed to Gartenkunst, Zeitschrift
für das gesamte Garten- und Siedlungswesen,
Landschaftsgestaltung,
Friedhofskultur, Gartentechnik
(‘Garden Art, journal for the entire
field of settlement, landscape design,
cemetery culture and garden
technics’). At the end of the 1930s
its subtitle was once more changed
slightly, and it was now officially
the ‘journal of the association
of garden designers in the Reich
Chamber for Fine Arts’, still edited
by the DGG. Today’s Garten und
Landschaft, not today’s Gartenkunst,
is considered its successor.
11 Heinrich 2013, available for
download at: https://depositonce.
tu-berlin.de/items/a6d1a7f4-
8404-4ca5-964f-61c646fdfdad
(accessed 18/09/2023).
12 Heinrich refers to her collection
as Archiv Vroni Heinrich
(2013: 471).
13 Mattern’s daughter Merete
unexpectedly passed away in 2007,
aged 77, shortly before a planned
meeting with the author.
14 While the correspondence in
the archive material breaks off
28/07/1927, Heinrich quotes from
letters that represent the direct
continuation (Heinrich 2013: 21–22).
15 May and Mattern 1964.
16 Blundell Jones 1995: 82, 84;
Woudstra and Blundell Jones
2002: 1.
17 See p. 313.
18 Zur Nedden, Beate’s maiden
name, will be used to refer to her
in the text, as she changed names
several times, occasionally using
her maiden name in combination
with her husbands’ names Mattern
or Maltusch, from her second
marriage after Mattern’s death.
19 Shoemaker 2001: 859–62.
There is also an entry in The
Oxford Companion to the Garden
(Taylor 2009: 301–02). In order to
get a better idea of the context
of Mattern’s work, readers
without knowledge of the German
language are also advised to
take a look at the entries for Karl
Foerster and Herta Hammerbacher
in The Oxford Companion to
the Garden (pp. 165 and 208, both
written by Sonja Dümpelmann)
and for Herta Hammerbacher
in The Encyclopedia of Gardens
(pp. 559–62, written by Joachim
Wolschke-Bulmahn).
20 Cf. Heinrich 2013: 10–11.
21 NSDAP file (index MFOK O
0044), file card Hermann Mattern,
membership no. 7409839, applied
for membership 02/12/1939,
granted 01/01/1940, BArch. It is
of course possible that he may
have hidden his membership from
his wife.
22 Heinrich 2013. It was published
around the time of completion
of the dissertation thesis that this
text is based upon, which is why
only a part of the lecture manuscripts
Heinrich presents from
her private collection have been
considered. It was published
during the final reviewing stage
of my dissertation thesis.
23 Another representative
of Gröning’s ‘school’ is Uwe
Schneider, author of the seminal
study on Muthesius’ influence on
the garden reform around 1900
(cf. Schneider 2000a; Schneider
2000b).
24 In a different context the
environmental historian Frank
Uekötter forcefully claimed a
selective view of Gröning and
Wolschke-Bulmahn ( Uekötter
2007: 70; Uekötter 2006:
211–12). A research collaborator
of Gröning’s, on the other
hand, has shown considerable
combativeness when accusing
other scholars (such as Charlotte
Reitsam, Stefan Körner and
generally the Eisel- Trepl-School,
referred to below) of downplaying
the responsibility of actors in the
Nazi state, see Schneider (2001)
and Reitsam’s response (2002).
Wolschke-Bulmahn (2008) has
also commented on this conflict
from his perspective.
25 This becomes particularly
obvious in a chapter by Gröning,
in which Mattern is merely
mentioned and two photos of his
seminal Killesberg park design
of 1939 are the only illustrations
in the chapter which are lacking
clear attribution (Gröning 2002).
At the same time the role (and
progressivism) of Georg Béla
Pniower appears to be overemphasised.
To be fair, it has to be noted
that Gröning himself emphasises
the character of his contribution as
‘fairly selective’ (p. 145), pointing
at the desiderate for comprehensive
research on the historical
phase it addresses.
26 Wolschke-Bulmahn 1990;
Wolschke-Bulmahn 2000;
Wolschke-Bulmahn 2005.
27 They are sometimes referred
to as of the ‘Eisel-Trepl-School’,
cf. Eisel 2011 and Prominski 2006.
28 In his doctoral dissertation
as well as his habilitation thesis
(Körner 2001; Körner 2010). For
a more accessible summary see
Körner (2002). A publication
with a related approach was
produced some years earlier by
Dorothea Hokema (1996) in form
of her ambitious comparative
graduation thesis on Mattern, Paul
Schultze-Naumburg and Willy
Lange. Another author obviously
influenced by Eisel and Trepel’s
teaching is Anette Voigt.
29 The seminal study is by Zeller
(2006), first published in German
in 2002. See also Reitsam 2009;
Strohkark 2001; Zutz 2009.
Reitsam (2002) deals specifically
with Mattern’s involvement.
30 Karn 2004: 26–29; 59–60;
Hiller 1997: 40–43; 49–50; 59–60.
31 Go 2003: 22–33.
32 Koenecke 2014.
33 Körner 2002; Reitsam 2002;
Zutz 2002.
34 Duthweiler 2011; Wimmer
2014.
35 Clemens Alexander Wimmer.
2024. Gärtner der Nation. Die
vier Leben des Karl Foerster
(Ilmtal-Weinstraße: VDG Weimar).
36 For a concise introduction to
this topic, see Kühne and Antrop
(2015). English translations of
two of several classical German
reference texts are: Simmel 1979
[1913]; Lucius Burckhardt, ‘Why
Is Landscape Beautiful? (1979)’,
in: Fezer & Schmitz 2016: 133–41.
21

Tendencies in
Modern Garden Art
The Architectonic and
the Landscape Modes
c. 1895–1933
23

If the tendency, to make the garden
a naturally seeming landscape
scenery, represents an artistic
derailment in itself, the unease
grows upon learning about
man’s desire to express with this
arranged nature certain ideas
and sentiments.
August Grisebach, 1910: 106
The landscape garden signifies,
seen from the perspective of
the historiography of ideas,
not disintegration and neglect,
but a further development,
i.e. the turning away from the
‘I’ to the cosmos. The clear
‘ratio’ of the symmetric gardens,
which are strange to our nature,
is here opposed to the ancient
‘irratio’ of the Germanic soul,
the limitedness and the formalism
to the idea of infinity.
Gerhard Hinz, 1937: 201
24 Tendencies in Modern Garden Art

While the time of fundamental reform in garden
design around 1900 is comparably well researched,
there is only limited literature available about
modernism in garden design in the 1920s. For
those years, only primary literature conveys a nuanced
impression, namely the journal Gartenkunst,
as the most important organ for practicing landscape
architects in the period. The debates on form
that took place within its pages – in those days still
at centre stage – are the backdrop against which
Mattern’s positioning becomes comprehensible.
The changing dynamics at the end of the 1920s
did not just spring from what is today generally
referred to as the modernist movement and its
social agenda; fundamental reforms of garden design
had already been triggered at the end of the
nineteenth century. 1 These defined essential points
valid for the coming decades. The following cur s-
ory overview is necessary knowledge to contextualise
of Mattern’s and Hammerbacher’s early
work in form-historical terms and to understand
debates dealt with later that refer to these formative
years.
Around the turn of the twentieth century,
within a few decades, garden design underwent
radical changes of style accompanied by fundamental
discussions about its social mission. During
the Industrial Revolution, the landscape garden,
once a representation of Enlightenment values,
became almost the opposite: a symbol of wealth
and social hierarchy. The smaller plots available in
urbanised areas resulted in a miniaturisation and
stereotyping of the original concept. Landscape
gardeners with a lack of aesthetic education were
largely blamed for this, but even renowned landscape
architects contributed to bad design practice.
2 In 1894, Carl Hampel (1848–1930), Berlin’s
municipal chief gardener and later garden director
at Leipzig, produced a garden design book that
presented one hundred standard patterns for small
gardens, which was republished as an extended
edition in 1902 (125 patterns) and again in 1905
(150 patterns), with a sixth edition produced as
late as 1921. 3 Such stencil books were popular to
allow everyone with a little patch of land to install
the infamous Brezelwege – a derogatory term for
the omnipresent entwined footpaths in the shape
of a southern German pretzel. The Ge mischter
Stil (Mixed Style) associated with the Royal
Prussian Garden Director-General Peter Joseph
Lenné (1789–1866) and his disciple Gustav Meyer
(1816–1877) – also known as the Lenné- Meyer
school – had not only become a formal stereotype,
but gardens had also become an anachronism
in terms of their social function. 4 Lawns were still
not supposed to be used, and parks were generally
intended for promenading and for the visual
enjoyment of the ‘calm’ and ‘ harmonic’ scenery.
Attractions were provided to foster patriotic
sentiments. 5 Seemingly at random, carpet beds
were inserted as decorative elements. The many
path crossings were covered up by clumps of trees.
Sample books such as Hampel’s showed endless
variations on the same theme, copied over and
over again ↗ fig. 1.
During the early 1900s, inspired by different
publications and an influx of the ideals of the Arts
and Crafts movement, a new type of public open
space was sought after that corresponded with the
changing demands of a healthy life as postulated
by the Lebensreform movement. The landschaftlich
design principle, and with it the idealist concept of
garden art standing behind it, began to be rejected
in favour of a discussion of spatial clarity. This led
to the triumph of the monumentalising geometries
of the architektonisch, or the architectonic principle.
6 In those days, battle lines were drawn that
remained in place well into the 1920s and beyond.
Although a more detailed look will reveal very different
approaches between examples of historicism
and those of an early modernism, both of which
were combined under this garden-historical label,
in the interest of brevity, ‘Architectonic Garden’ is
used here as an established term. 7 The dichotomy
of the two modes, architectonic and landschaftlich,
has also dominated garden historiography, and
contributed to the obscuring of progressive design
concepts not so easily categorised. For Mattern,
the conceptual pair ‘architectonic– landschaftlich’
was less important than the differentiation between
a geometrical – especially symmetrical –
preconceived formal idea that was imposed on
a site, versus an organic idea that responded to
the site’s characteristics and spatial configuration.
While the Bornimers were arguably not the only
ones declaring such an ambition for garden design,
they were the ones realising it more consistently
than others.
When the term ‘organic’ is applied to the
Bornimers, more misconceptions arise. Organic
is often equated with curvilinear and naturalistic.
The architectonic principle is identified as
its opposite. Such a perspective ignores that
an architectonic (geometrical) design can be
25 The Architectonic and the Landscape Modes, c. 1895–1933

Fig. 1 A typical spread from Carl
Hampel’s 150 kleine Gärten (1921:
146–47, 1st edn 1894), 6th edition
of the classic ‘stencil book’.
Fig. 2 In his highly influential
Das englische Haus, Muthesius
discussed both historic (or historicist)
examples like the gardens
designed by R. S. Lorimer for
the restored Earlshall Castle in
Fifeshire, Scotland (1908: 100) …
Fig. 3 … and new gardens by
modern architects, like the garden
for Prior’s Field Comton, Surrey,
by C. F. A. Voysey (1908: 84).
26 Tendencies in Modern Garden Art

Fig. 5 One of the negative
examples presented by Paul
Schultze-Naumburg in the volume
on gardens in his Kulturarbeiten
series (1902: 195), ridiculing the
type of ‘miniature lake Lucerne’
that was also part of many examples
shown in Hampel’s stencil
book that was released in a second
expanded edition in the same
year (cf. fig. 1).
Fig. 4 The name of Hans Markart,
here shown in his atelier in a
painting by Eduard Charlemont
(c. 1880), stood symbolically for the
exuberant, dark and exotic ‘Makart
bouquets’ of the late 1800s that
were a stereotypical feature of his
popular portraiture and still lifes
(Wien Museum, inv. no. 47260,
CC BY 4.0, Foto: Birgit und Peter
Kainz, https://sammlung.wienmuseum.at/objekt/1473/).
Fig. 6 Garden furniture, positive
and negative examples,
from the volume on gardens
in Paul Schultze-Naumburg’s
Kulturarbeiten series (1902:
224–25).
27 The Architectonic and the Landscape Modes, c. 1895–1933

Fig. 29 Plan of a symmetric garden
typical for Harry Maasz’s work
in the 1920s (Maasz 1926: 218).
Fig. 30 Photograph of the same garden by Harry
Maasz. The informality of the rustic stones and
naturalistic planting contrasts with the symmetry of
the general layout (Maasz 1926: 221).
44 Tendencies in Modern Garden Art

Fig. 31 A design by Michael
Mappes, referred to as ‘unusual’
and ‘promising’ when it was
published in 1925 in Gartenkunst
(page from: Koch 1927: 301).
Fig. 32 Gabriel Guévrékian’s
famous garden for the Villa
Noailles on Hyères at the French
Côte d’Azure was discussed by
the Austrian art historian Leopold
Zahn in Gartenschönheit (06/1929:
222–23).
45 The Architectonic and the Landscape Modes, c. 1895–1933

Part I
Early Influences
1902–c. 1930
69

Learning to See:
A Wandervogel Youth
in the Land of Fables
[…] it is not essential to convey
a specific theoretical knowledge,
nor to enable the hand to perform
certain external manipulations.
But it is essential to train the
artistic sensitivity, to make the
hand and the eye a servant to
the fantasy. 1
Konrad Lange, 1901
Mattern was born on 27 November 1902 as the
sixth of eight children. 2 He grew up in Hofgeismar,
a Protestant, Northern-Hessian town in
the Prussian province of Hesse-Nassau, which
until the annexation in 1866 was the independent
Landgraviate of Hesse-Cassel. Even today, Hofgeismar
is embedded in a scenic landscape, rich
in both wooded and extensively cultivated land,
surrounded by the low, forested mountains of
the Teutoburger Wald (Teutoburg Forest), Egge
Hills, Habichtswald and Reinhardswald. It is a
mystical landscape famously steeped in history and
folk mythology. Not far from Hofgeismar, near
Detmold, stands the Hermannsdenkmal, a site
of romantic-nationalist worship and memorial to
the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest (Varusschlacht)
in which united Germanic tribes destroyed three
Roman legions led by the General Varus. Northern
Hesse is also connected to the folk- and fairy
tales written down by the brothers Grimm who
lived in Kassel, a historically important city some
twenty- five kilometres south of Hofgeismar.
Mattern’s feeling for the landscape and his ecological
conscience were grounded in the beauty
of the picturesque region in which he grew up.
Thanks to his many expeditions with the local
Wandervogel youth movement group, Mattern
was extremely familiar with the detailed characteristics
of this landscape: years later, when he
applied for a job in the road-planning project, he
claimed to know Lower Hesse, Upper Hesse, the
Harz area, the Rhön area, and Westphalia ‘completely’
and ‘seen from the country road’. 3
Another probable influence is his Protestant
mother’s lovingly cared-for vegetable and flower
garden. 4 His rather serious father, an armourer
and devout Catholic, had worked hard to reach a
position in the local postal administration to earn
his family a decent living, but always felt slightly
humiliated by his wife’s Protestant background. 5
One particular protagonist of Mattern’s youth
mentioned as influential in one of his first publications
– without his name being disclosed – as well
as in his last published curriculum vitae is his art
teacher Adolf Faust (1882–1945) at the Hofgeismar
Gymnasium ↗ fig. 52. 6 Several accounts profess to
the effectiveness of this man’s teachings. 7 Mattern
kept in touch with the Faust family even after his
teacher’s death, and one of his first documented
design sketches for a garden was for his teacher,
somewhat reminiscent of Migge’s roughly contemporary
May garden and probably the only perfectly
71 Early Influences, 1902–c. 1930

symmetrical design Mattern ever produced
↗ fig. 53; cf. 39, 40. 8
Under the auspices of a ‘true artist’
Some details of Faust’s tuition are documented and
his grandson attests to their focus on ‘learning to
see’. 9 In the morning, at the beginning of his class,
Faust used to ask the pupils what they had seen on
their way to school: ‘You surely did not come here
blindly!’ 10 Or Faust entered the room covering his
mouth asking if he had a beard or not. When the
answer to such ‘tests’ came wrong, he urged the
class to pay more attention to the details of their
everyday environment. Thus he made clear that ‘to
see’ does not always have the same meaning, and
that seeing consciously should be trained – this
seems to have been the most cherished objective
of his task as a teacher.
Faust came from the Saarland and, following
his father’s example, went to Kassel to attend art
college 11 from 1908 until 1911 to train as an artist
and gain a certificate to qualify as a teacher for
secondary schools. 12 His own artistic work was not
fixed to one particular style. Instead, he seemed to
have received a range of influences from romantic
landscape painting, via the Nazarene movement
(or the Pre-Raphaelites) and impressionism to expressionism.
13 He revered Caspar David Friedrich
and intensely engaged with expressionists like
Ludwig Meidner (1884–1966) and the Austrian
illustrator Alfred Kubin (1877–1959), and with the
impressionist Max Slevogt (1868–1932). New Objectivity
also seems to resonate in his later work.
Widely known in his home region are Faust’s
woodcuts of rural scenes and more detailed nature
studies of pieces of coarse wood debris or groups
of old trees and suchlike, reproduced in the periodical
of the local history society until today ↗ fig. 54.
Some of them resemble medieval block illustrations,
others show a more impressionistic manner.
Faust was acquainted with the former military
painter Theodor Rocholl, an influential professor
at the Düsseldorf Art Academy, who in Northern
Hesse is remembered for saving the nearby
Hutewald around the Sababurg – a type of anthropogenic
forest shaped by its former use as a wood
pasture – which through his initiative in 1907 became
one of Germany’s first nature reserves. This
illustrates how special the regional woodland surrounding
Hofgeismar was considered even in the
period of Mattern’s youth, rich in ancient trees and
atmospheric sites. One was the castle Sababurg,
known as the setting of the brothers Grimm’s
fairy tale ‘Little Briar Rose’ (in English, ‘Sleeping
Beauty’), and another was Beberbeck, one of the
five Prussian state stud farms. The nearby Reinhardswald
is still one of Germany’s most expansive
and least populated wooded landscapes, home of
a varied and elsewhere extinct flora and fauna
including the wildcat (Felis sylvestris sylvestris) and
the black stork (Ciconia nigra). 14 Ancient woodland,
as in the unique Hutewald, home to 450 trees, 15
bear witness to traditional forestry techniques and
other cultural uses. For Faust, however, retreating
into a provincial country town also meant keeping
aloof from the artistic avant-garde in the bigger
cities.
Faust never became a famous artist, and exhibitions
of his work received mixed reviews, but
amongst his students were several creative figures
of considerable importance. Besides Mattern, there
was the ceramicist Theodor Bogler, his younger
brother Friedrich Wilhelm Bogler, a painter who
did not survive the war, and the renowned glass
painter Hans-Gottfried von Stockhausen, as well
as several artists and architects of lesser importance,
but known on a regional level. In the former
district administration town of Hofgeismar, now
incorporated into the district of Kassel, Faust’s role
as artist and teacher for arts education – music,
theatre and fine arts – was momentous enough for
two commemorative events. The first was an exhibition
of his work on the occasion of the opening
of the new school building in 1953 at the edge of
town, now named Albert-Schweitzer School. At
that time, Mattern was commissioned to design the
entire school grounds, but that project has disappeared
almost completely under another extension
of the school campus some fifty years later. At the
first commemoration day, a handwritten note from
Faust’s sketchbooks was presented as a leitmotif of
his career: ‘The school is a living piece of homeland
[Heimat], no coincidental background, in front
of which school life takes place.’ 16 If descriptions
of Faust’s work sound euphoric, his career as an
artist was compromised by his dedication to teaching,
to his engagement with the youth movement,
to conducting several choirs, and to his function as
church organist. 17 The modesty of his artistic career
should be seen in this context, which limited
his opportunity to elaborate a personal style. For
an art educator artistic maturity could have been
seen as ossification. He was rewarded with the
respected title of Studienrat, but he struggled all his
72 Part I

life with the conflict between his artistic and his
pedagogical careers. 18 Nonetheless, by the end he
had compiled an oeuvre vast enough to contain
some paintings considered masterly, and which
were gathered in the last exhibition of his work
that he experienced himself, held in August 1944
in the ballroom of Wilhemshöhe castle.
At the second commemorative event, on the
occasion of the new school’s fiftieth anniversary, a
leaflet was produced containing insightful recollections
of former students of Faust’s. They reported
that he had focused on having students develop
their own talents, while earlier teachers had merely
let them copy by drawing. 19 Under Faust they
learned to use their senses critically: 20
He taught us to truly listen and to use our
eyes for concentrated, corporeal and colouroriented
seeing. The world of the third dimension
was opened up to us. With devotion
we drew isometrically and we foreshortened.
Often singing at the same time.
We learned to take in, to invent and to
develop spatial and colour compositions. 21
Faust taught his students various etching, drawing
and painting techniques. The classes were often
held outside at the Sababurg or in the villages,
where the traditional Lower-Saxon half-timbered
houses provided colourful motifs. 22 ‘He also respected
all those rural handcrafted shapes in the
household and the building, as long as they spoke
of a pure sentiment or displayed a werkstoff gerecht
(true to the material) kind of individual gestalt.’ 23
Such objects, which he found in old attics or
farm houses, Faust used as models for his drawing
classes. 24 All this adds to the impression that he
must have felt drawn to the ideals of the Heimatschutz
movement; and he thus implemented
educational aims that had become national educational
policy around 1900, namely to foster in students
a feeling of being at home in their local
landscape. 25 Faust’s own notes, kept by his family,
enable us to reconstruct his teaching programme
in considerable detail:
I. Free creative production 26
a) Objectification of an idea
b) Free rhythmic creative production
with line and plane
c) Free learning with volumes
d) Linoleum cut
II. Training of the faculty of imagination
The form elements will be sought in nature.
Structuring of the landscape by paths;
space, village and house.
The human body with its proportions and
means of expression. Machines, inoperative
and in movement, buildings and parts of
buildings, household appliances and furniture.
III. Training of the faculty of observation
The Lower-Saxon farmhouse (house gable,
beam order, gate, door, window, roof, wood
carvings, interior spaces, vestibule, staircase,
railing). Parts of the landscape (bridge, clump
of trees, bank border, stone quarry, sunken
lane, avenues)
IV. Drawing from the microscope. Symmetrical
representation. Light and shade. Intersections
and foreshortenings.
Still life: The objects will be assembled following
certain laws, and the student searches
to find these laws and to represent them.
Human, animal, machine.
While drawing, the colours of the subject’s
appearance will be sought.
V. Type-font after own re-creation, under
particular consideration of its significance as
surface decoration and its use for book printing
and in advertising. Decorative work.
VI. Reflection on art
Architecture: basic forms and particulars of
the building: column, plinth, frieze.
Arrangement of the windows, the moulding,
door and gate, bay and balcony, profiles, column
shaft and capital, the round arch and the
cross vault, pointed arch and buttress, transept,
crossing and cupola/ground plan. 27
The study of real and natural objects had been an
essential part of any reformist art pedagogy from
around 1900 onward. While the artistic means
of expression in school classes were, until the
1920s, still focused almost exclusively on drawing,
progressive tendencies moved towards a ‘close
connection with nature’ and consideration of an
‘artistic individuality’. 28 Well into the twentieth
century, the copying of classical ornamentation –
above all, elements from Renaissance decorative
art – and, before that, formalist, mathematically
73 Early Influences, 1902–c. 1930

Fig. 52 The centre of Hofgeismar
today, with the building that used
to house Mattern’s school in the
background.
Fig. 53 Mattern’s axonometric drawing of a garden
design for his former art teacher and Wander vogel
group leader at Hofgeismar, Adolf Faust, July 1927.
This is Mattern’s only known strictly axisymmetrical
design (Heinrich 2013: 77).
Fig. 54 Sketch of wood debris
by Adolf Faust in the Heimatjahrbuch
Hessen 1940.
74 Part I

Fig. 55 View of the Hohe Meißner
in 1923; it was the mountain near
Mattern’s home town that was
revered by the youth movement
(AdJb, F 1, no 112/23, postcard /
photo Julius Groß).
Fig. 56 Speech by the pedagogue
Gustav Wyneken (1875–1964) at
the Hohe Meißner meeting of 1913
(AdJb, F 4, no. 182_8).
Fig. 57 The Monument to the Battle of the
Nations, inaugurated in 1913 for the centenary
of the Battle of Leipzig and at the time the
tallest monument in Europe (Leipzig city
archive, 0563, inv. no. 1988/26692 / photo
Alfred Gruber, 1913).
75 Early Influences, 1902–c. 1930

Part II
Continuities Across Systems
1927–c. 1960
175

Atmosphere of
Departure and
Disillusionment:
Postwar Art and Life
Silently the soaring ruins stare
at us, not as if they had collapsed
in the din of explosions, but as
if they had slumped down from
an internal cause. Can we, do
we want to rebuild all this cruel
unmasked machinery of our
engineered existence […] ?
No, says the inner voice. 1
Otto Bartning, 1947
After the war was over, Mattern tried to secure his
belongings at Bornim and retreated into his old
farmhouse south-east of Munich. 2 Disillusioned,
for a short while it looked as though nothing
could entice him away from the place that had
already served as a peaceful retreat during the
turbulent years. The loss of dear friends caused
him much grief. Schlemmer’s tragic end in 1943
will not have left Mattern cold. Then his brotherin-law
Henner Röse, born 1911, committed
suicide in 1945. 3 The same year came the notice
of the death of Mattern’s oldest friend, Friedrich
Wilhelm Bogler, who had died in a field hospital
in Zell am See in Austria. Yet Mattern had a
rather privileged position around the time of the
Zusammenbruch. Neither of his houses was affected
by bombing. At Graimharting, during the last
years of the war, he and his wife had even retained
the capacity to provide refugees with lodging. 4
Contacts were sought to hear if friends were well.
In late 1946, Ferdinand Möller wrote to Foerster
at Bornim from his summer house at Zermützel,
eighty kilometres to the north:
From the Matterns we recently received a
lengthy letter. He dedicates himself wholeheartedly
to agriculture and is regaining his
strengths. There will be enough to do for
all of us here, once the waters have cleared. 5
Soon the sorrows stepped into the background as
all were confronted with such urgent work. Shortly
after the capitulation of the Germans in May 1945,
Hans Scharoun had been named planning councillor
by the Soviet administration of Berlin. In 1946,
he headed a municipal planning collective with
six specialised architects and Reinhold Lingner as
landscape architect that presented the infamous
‘Kollektivplan’ for central Berlin: a ribbon-like
reorganisation of Berlin’s urban morphology along
the Berlin glacial valley and with almost no consideration
of the historically grown city ↗ fig. 237. 6
The same year, the Deutsche Werkbund was reestablished
at Berlin; its first symposium took place
at Berlin on 5 December 1946. Amongst others,
Scharoun, Lingner and Mattern were strongly
involved; minutes of the meeting document that
Mattern insistently demanded a better consideration
of landscape-related matters in future planning
legislation. 7 Mattern’s skills were needed,
especially as he was considered politically unburdened.
It would have seemed uncharacteristic for
283 Continuities Across Systems, 1927–c. 1960

Fig. 237 ‘Kollektivplan’, 1945–46,
by the planning collective around
the new planning councillor for
Berlin, Hans Scharoun, suggesting
a reconstruction of Berlin based
on an east-west orientation along
the glacial valley (Geist and
Kürvers 1989: front endpaper).
Figs. 238, 239 Reconstruction
concept for Kassel, Hermann
Mattern with Paul and Arnold
Bode, 1949–51. Note, above the
orangery castle, the positioning
of the box-shaped theatre,
moved to the side in order to
open up the Friedrichs platz
towards the landscape garden
below (AMTUB, 26972; 26984).
284 Part II

Figs. 240–242 Three drawings
for the Hinrichssegen settlement
Mattern designed between
1945 and 1953 (AMTUB, 26250;
F 2686; F 25241).
285 Continuities Across Systems, 1927–c. 1960

Figs. 267–269 Three sketches of the situation at the Friedrichplatz, Kassel, comparing
the baroque square (top), the Wilhelmine theatre (centre) and the proposal by Hans Scharoun
with Hermann Mattern, 1949–52 (AMTUB, 26967; AMTUB, 26968; AMTUB, 26969).
304 Part II

Figs. 270, 271 Situations found
at the ‘Rosenhang’ (‘Rose Slope’),
showing the landscape view
from the top and the stone walls
and stairs (photos taken May
2008 and March 2012).
Fig. 272 Mattern with Karl Foerster in front of
the war memorial from 1928 that is part of the
slope beneath Schöne Aussicht, Kassel, 1955
(StArchKssl, 0.516.021 / photo: Carl Eberth).
Fig. 273 Overall plan for the Federal Garden
Show Kassel 1955 , including the delineation
of the unusual shape of the planned theatre
by Scharoun and Mattern. Canals and general
spatial structure are relics of the baroque
garden destroyed in the war bombings. The
drop shaped flower beds may be read as a
memory of the former broderie parterre
(AMTUB, 28540).
305 Continuities Across Systems, 1927–c. 1960

Fig. 274 Aerial view of the
Karls aue at Kassel at the time
of the first documenta and the
Bundes gartenschau in 1955
(StArch Kssl, 274 E1K Bugal a).
306 Part II

307 Continuities Across Systems, 1927–c. 1960

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