ISSUE 10 SPRING 2003

Atlantropa

EDIT SUISSE GROUP

From: http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/10/atlantropa.php, accessed 27 July 06,

by WZ.

In Gene Roddenberry's 1979 book version of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Admiral
(former Captain) Kirk stands on a huge dam near Gibraltar; the dam blocks the Atlantic
Ocean from the Mediterranean, and uses it to generate electric power. Is this possible or is
it just fantasy? Some answers may be found in a book that Roddenberry had in his own
library, Willy Ley's 1954 Engineers' Dreams, given to him by the German-American
scientist and science fiction writer Jesco von Puttkamer. In it, Ley describes a project
called "Atlantropa," devised by a German architect and engineer named Herman Sörgel
(1885-1952).

From 1927 until his death 25 years later, Sörgel worked on plans for a gigantic project that
was initially named "Panropa" and later "Atlantropa." With the help of a 35 km-long dam in
the Straits of Gibraltar, he wanted to cut off the water supply from the Atlantic to the
Mediterranean, letting the sea gradually dry up until its water level was reduced by some
200 meters. This was supposed to open up 600,000 square kilometers of new land and
enable marvellous new capacities for power generation.

In Sörgel's plan, a bridge from Tunisia to Sicily would divide the Mediterranean into two
different parts, creating a continuous automobile and train connection between Africa and
Europe. By converting the Congo Basin into an enormous dammed-up sea, Africa would be
turned into a "territory actually useful to Europe," he wrote. Sörgel followed a social
Darwinist and colonialist school of thought, declaring, "The fight for survival is a fight for
territory." Uninhibited by compromises or scruples, the engineer concentrated on
reinventing the Mediterranean as a huge power plant. On its western side, the remaining
water was to be dammed by gigantic constructions near Gibraltar and between Italy,
Sicily, and Tunis. In the eastern half, the sea was supposed to be shaped by the Tunis-
Sicily-Italy dam and further dams close to Galipoli and near the Suez Canal. At these
points, large power plants were planned to ensure energy and economic security for
Europe, Africa, and the Arabian peninsula. This new continent, which Sörgel named
"Atlantropa," was to assume the role of a counterweight to America and Asia.

In four Atlantropa books and some 1000 publications, Sörgel combined a Spenglerian
despair of civilization with an engineer's megalomania. The racist thinking of Sörgel's time,
which saw Africa as an empty continent void of history and culture, was integrated in his
belief in technology's political power. While he did find some audience for his plans in the
Weimar Republic, the monocle-wearing dreamer was unable to muster any support from
the National Socialists for his plans.

Yet Sörgel's ideas nevertheless inspired a large number of contemporary intellectuals,

architects, and writers. Not only have a handful of works obviously borrowed from Sörgel—
including a 1950 movie called Atlantropa: Der neue Erdteil—Das Land der Zukunft
[Atlantropa: The New Continent, Land of the Future]—his plans also proved inspirational to
architects like Peter Behrens and Erich Mendelsohn. Mendelsohn offered his services to
Sörgel for the planning of the new coastline of Palestine, which would have been radically
different with the reclaiming of the new land created by the Atlantropa project. It is known
that, in 1932, Sörgel himself was reflecting on the effects of these geographical changes
on Palestine in relation to the question of the foundation of a Jewish State. 1 Unfortunately
nothing is known about any plans advanced by Mendelsohn, a German Jewish architect
who had to flee Germany in 1933.

Nevertheless, in 1932, a few months before his emigration, Mendelsohn supported the
Atlantropa plan in a manifesto-style speech given in Zurich. To him, Atlantropa offered a
chance to overcome the general crisis he had diagnosed in society. This crisis, amplified by
the consequences of World War I in his view, encompassed all areas of society: politics,
culture, economics, architecture, fine art, literature, and science. With the help of a "world
restructuring" driven by technology, Mendelsohn would find an escape from this crisis. He
proclaimed:

The upcoming world will allow the nations their characteristics, but unites them into a
comprehensive community. Because the problems of the new world affect all peoples as
one. We cannot retreat! The speed of traffic has crowded the nations close together, forces
them into larger units, in order to avoid getting crushed... We must achieve a state of
methodical exchange: of food and capabilities, of production and ingenuity. For this, great
supra-national tasks are needed that create new space, new territory, new workspace. The
Canal des Deux Mers comes to mind,2 connecting Marseille and Bordeaux, the
Mediterranean and the English Channel, the Panropa-Project, which wants to recover
Europe's actual fruit country, the Mediterranean Basin, by uncovering the once flooded
areas with the help of the Gibraltar dam.3 These are productive technical global tasks that
want to finally, logically value a century of technological inventions. Such tasks finally
bring man's reign over technology, so that technology serves him, rather than enslaves
him. Because technology and machine are only tools in the hands of man, simply a new
element of his knowing-about-the-world, as once water-fire-air-and-soil. Because, if we
recognize the elements, then we will overcome chaos—if we build from the elements, then
a new world will emerge ... Therefore, we believe in a new world, in a life of reason and
order—in politics, economics, and public life. The belief in the accuracy of this
interpretation is the deep significance of need, the creative significance of this crisis. 4 As
Mendelsohn's speech suggests, the Atlantropa project must be considered within the wider
framework of similar projects of that time. From 1923 to 1932, in a huge effort, engineers
succeeded in reclaiming the Zuidersee in the Netherlands by building a dam between it
and the North Sea, gaining thousands of hectares of land. Sörgel wasn't the only one who
had been inspired by this enterprise—Sigmund Freud was also aware of it. In his "31st
Lecture on Psychoanalysis" of 1932, Freud described the objective of a psychoanalytic
intervention as "Where id was, there ego shall be" ("Wo Es war, soll Ich werden"), from
which the following is usually omitted: "It is a work of culture—not unlike the draining of
the Zuider Zee" ("Es ist Kulturarbeit etwa wie die Trockenlegung der Zuydersee"). 5 One of
the central aims of this process would be the discovery of feelings of guilt at the bottom of
one's memory.

Taking into account the colonizing subtext of the concept of "reclamation" as used here,
Freud's characterization of the "Id" has been compared to Hegel's characterization of
Africa.6 But some scholars have also identified a direct parallel between psychology and
geography in the context of psychoanalytic intervention, a process that would allow "the
Ich to reclaim (aneignen) parts of the Es. This metaphor points, once again, to a
remarkable simultaneity between events on the level of water management and changes
on the level of culture and ideology. From a philosophical point of view, there is a clear
affinity between fin-de-siecle (bourgeois) psychology and fin-de-siecle (bourgeois)
geography."7

On 25 December 1952, Herman Sörgel died as a result of a car accident. The Atlantropa
Institute, an association of collaborators and patrons, dissolved in 1960. These days, the
Atlantropa project seems to appear only in the titles of New Age CDs 8 or, strangely
enough, in 2003, in German high schools, where it is still being used as a question on a
physics exam in which students are asked to calculate the lowering of the Mediterranean's
water level. The test mentions the project as if it was currently being planned and the
pupils could contribute to its success by solving a mathematics problem: "How many
people could be provided with energy from this power plant?", the test asks.

In this hypothetical math problem, Sörgel's extravagant scheme is resituated in the same
indeterminate space between fact and fantasy where it always belonged. One fact hardly
ever mentioned is that Sörgel's costly 25-year endeavor was only made possible because
of financial support from his wife, Irene Sörgel, who was a successful art dealer.

Thanks to Anjana Shrivastava and Christopher Mühlenberg.

1 — For this and other information on Sörgel's project, see Alexander Gall, Das Atlantropa-Projekt.
Die Geschichte einer gescheiterten Vision. Herman Sörgel und die Absenkung des Mittelmeers
(Frankfurt and New York: Campus, 1998).
2 — Another project dating from 1928 which was never realized in the form to which Mendelsohn
refers.
3 — Here Mendelsohn refers to the theory that the Mediterranean basin was not originally under
water. Sörgel also used this theory as the backbone of his plan, claiming that his scheme would in
part restore the basin to its original state. It is known that Sörgel knew about this theory by reading
H. G. Wells's The Outline of History. This theory has now successfully been proven by the Zurich-
based Chinese geologist Kenneth Hsü, e.g. in his publication The Mediterranean Was a Desert: A
Voyage of the Glomar CHALLENGER (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983).
4 — Erich Mendelsohn, Der schöpferische Sinn der Krise. Vortrag, gehalten auf dem Kongreß des
Internationalen Verbandes fuer kulturelle Zusammenarbeit in Zürich (Berlin: Bruno Cassierer Verlag,
1932), pp. 28-29. Translation by the edit suisse group.
5 — Sigmund Freud, "The Dissection of the Psychical Personality," Lecture 31 in New Introductory
Lectures on Psychoanalysis, trans. James Strachey (London & New York: Penguin Books, 1991), p.
112.
6 — Helmut Stockhammer, Schnappschüsse in Schwarzweiss, oder: wo liegt Afrika? Kolonialistische
Denkformen in Hegels Geschichtsphilosophie und Freuds Metapsychologie. Available at .
7 — Hub Zwart, "Aquaphobia and Tulipomania: An Eco-Historical Narrative (A Concise Philosophical
History of the Dutch Landscape)." A revised version is available in Environmental Values under the
title "Aquaphobia, Tulipmania, Biophilia: A Moral Geography of the Dutch Landscape" at .
8 — MP3 files of selected tracks from a CD titled Atlantropa are available at <www.demo-
art.com/music/31_atlantropa_eng.html>.
The edit suisse group is based in Berlin, Germany, and consists of one architect and three
media-workers. Members are Martin Conrads, Ulrich Guitmar, Silvan Linden, and Stefan
Schreck. A sound and slide installation by the edit suisse group about the Atlantropa
project has been shown in both Tel Aviv and Berlin and was presented in New York in
2001.