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

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