Idyll and Ideology

This first English biography of Hermann Mattern (1902-1971), one of Germany's principal twentieth-century landscape architects, critically assesses the idiosyncrasies of his organic-functionalist position while offering a new reading of German garden culture of his time. Mattern's work embodies several themes of the German landscape discourse as well as the central ambivalence of his generation: a life spanning the artistic avant-garde of the 1920s and an apparently apolitical career under the Nazi regime and in the postwar period. Based on comprehensive archival research, Hopstock's richly illustrated study uncovers the professional networks, debates, and rivalries that shaped the profession of landscape architecture in Germany during its formative decades.