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Article ID: CBB559526516

Infinite Power to Change the World: Hydroelectricity and Engineered Climate Change in the Atlantropa Project (2016)

Lehmann, Philipp Nicolas (Author)

American Historical Review
Volume: 121
Issue: 1
Pages: 70-100

DOI: 10.1093/ahr/121.1.70

URI: http://ahr.oxfordjournals.org/content/121/1/70

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Hydroelectric power Energy resources and technologies Engineering Utopias 20th century, early Germany

This article examines the Atlantropa Project of the German architect Herman Sörgel as a window onto the interconnected histories of environmental anxiety and technological optimism in Europe during the first half of the twentieth century. In the late 1920s, Sörgel conceived of Atlantropa as an answer to Oswald Spengler’s warnings about Europe’s inevitable cultural decline. The main feature of the project was a gigantic dam across the Strait of Gibraltar, which would not only create a connected and climate-engineered Afro-European super-continent, but also provide a potentially inexhaustible source of hydropower. Sörgel was convinced that the availability of cheap and boundless energy would ring in a new, peaceful era, and form the basis for a coming unified and revitalized European society. Despite the unprecedented and utopian scale, the plans were more than the expression of an eccentric mind. Sörgel’s anxieties about environmental decline and resource exhaustion paired with his belief in the absolute primacy of technology reflected contemporary debates and struck a chord with the public. Atlantropa thus stands as a striking example of both the entanglement of environmental and political ideas in interwar Germany and the still understudied history of the unrealized utopian projects of high modernism.

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