to ‘disturb’ each other and there was a deficiency of ‘order’ and ‘accordance.’ Only anticipatory measures could help now: There was a need for a ‘plan.’ ” (Leendertz 2009, 130). The lack of harmony also concerned the relationship between urban and rural areas. In the critics’ eyes, this became obvious through the uncontrolled growth of cities into the surrounding landscape. Landesplanung should provide reconciliation: “Landesplanung aims at a harmonic unity of landscapes, forms of economy and housing. The forms of administration are lately being adapted to the prior mentioned in order to achieve perfect harmony between all expressions of human existence”* For the preservation movement, the evolving Landesplanung provided an opportunity to modernize itself as Landespflege and to leave the “romantic heritage” of the early days behind. Landespflege as a discipline was suitable for ensuring the reconciliation between technical artifacts and cultural landscape as, e.g., proposed by Lindner in Ingenieurwerk und Naturschutz: “Concerning all of this we cannot move forward without making a generous effort to balance on the one hand what needs to stay the most valuable treasure of our people’s nature and on the other what must perforce be and become technology. … We need complete insight and a total overview, in order to calibrate the planning and planning goals of such construction processes to national economics in the broadest sense and to the image of our homeland as the most significant expression of natural processes in the most precise way. Only this will be able to reconcile the relations of technology with the existing forms of landscape” (Lindner 1926, 7). Landespflege, in this context, sees itself as the discipline of reconciliation and compensation between the specific character of cultural landscapes and the industrially shaped appearance of technical artifacts. The objective of Landesplanung and Landespflege was the harmonization of spatial development in Germany using the idea of organic planning, which could be interpreted as the instrumental application of Herder’s idea of cultivation. Technical progress should be integrated and therefore “tamed” as a new component of an organic spatial development with this kind of individualized planning and design.
This “taming” of progress through integration into individual cultures by means of Landespflege took a new direction under the rule of the National Socialists. The maintenance of cultural landscapes, which is based on the development of various units of land and people, was combined with industrialization to transform it into a project focusing on progress. The associated landscape ideology was thereby thrown into internal conflicts between the attempt to perfect the cultural landscape, which is the expression of “cultural work with and applied to nature” of the inhabiting (and therefore rooted) people, and the abstract domination of nature by technological progress. To solve these inner contradictions, the National Socialist’ landscape designers introduced racism into their landscape ideology: If one specific land and people unit, namely the German, proves to be especially successful in the cultivation of natural circumstances, its duty is also to apply its inventive capacities to the development of cultural landscapes in other countries in the sense of a universal human mandate for Kulturarbeit.†