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Find out more Skip to Main Content Advertisement Oxford Academic * Search Menu * Account * Menu * Account Navbar Search Filter [This issue ] Mobile Microsite Search Term [ ] Search * Sign In + * Issues * More Content + Advance articles + AHR Interview + History Unclassified + AHR Online * Submit + Author Guidelines + Submission Site * Purchase * Alerts * About + About The American Historical Review + About the American Historical Association + Editorial Board + Advertising and Corporate Services + Self-Archiving Policy + Dispatch Dates The American Historical Review American Historical Association * Issues * More Content + Advance articles + AHR Interview + History Unclassified + AHR Online * Submit + Author Guidelines + Submission Site * Purchase * Alerts * About + About The American Historical Review + About the American Historical Association + Editorial Board + Advertising and Corporate Services + Self-Archiving Policy + Dispatch Dates Close search filter [All The American Historical Review] search input [ ] Search Advanced Search Search Menu Article Navigation Close mobile search navigation Article Navigation Issue Cover Volume 121 Issue 1 February 2016 Article Contents * Abstract * < Previous * Next > Article Navigation Article Navigation Infinite Power to Change the World: Hydroelectricity and Engineered Climate Change in the Atlantropa Project Philipp Nicolas Lehmann Philipp Nicolas Lehmann Philipp Nicolas Lehmann is a Research Scholar in Department II at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. His dissertation, "Changing Climates: Deserts, Desiccation, and the Rise of Climate Engineering," was awarded the 2015 Rachel Carson Prize of the American Society for Environmental History. Lehmann is currently preparing a book manuscript on the basis of the dissertation and is concurrently working on a study of data collection and data use in colonial meteorology and climatology during the last decades of the long nineteenth century. pnlehmannbos@gmail.com Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 121, Issue 1, February 2016, Pages 70-100, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/121.1.70 Published: 08 February 2016 * pdfPDF * Split View * Views + Article contents + Figures & tables + Video + Audio + Supplementary Data * Cite Cite Philipp Nicolas Lehmann, Infinite Power to Change the World: Hydroelectricity and Engineered Climate Change in the Atlantropa Project, The American Historical Review, Volume 121, Issue 1, February 2016, Pages 70-100, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/121.1.70 Select Format [Select format ] Download citation Close * Permissions Icon Permissions * Share + Email + Twitter + Facebook + More Navbar Search Filter [This issue ] Mobile Microsite Search Term [ ] Search * Sign In + Close search filter [All The American Historical Review] search input [ ] Search Advanced Search Search Menu Abstract This article examines the Atlantropa Project of the German architect Herman Sorgel 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, Sorgel 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. Sorgel 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. Sorgel'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. energy, hydropower, climate, engineering, utopia, decline In a 1936 newspaper article, the German architect Herman Sorgel pondered the future of the world's energy consumption: If one bears in mind that coal and oil consumption is steadily rising and that coal reserves are being ruthlessly depleted because of the entirely uneconomical methods of exploitation, one will realize with alarm that it is high time to begin developing adequate alternatives for substitution.^1 Sorgel was not alone in this view. The first half of the twentieth century saw a proliferation of both fears about looming energy shortages and proposals to replace coal with renewable alternatives. Hydroelectric power, a "new" source of energy made possible by advances in turbine technology and the conduction of electric current in the late nineteenth century, was particularly successful in capturing the imaginations of Europeans. It became not simply a means to increase electricity output, but a vehicle for ideas that touched on far more extensive transformations. In an almost lyrical passage penned in 1922, one French observer likened hydropower, or "white coal," to "an element of balance in peaceful wars, a defensive weapon in bad days, an inexhaustible wealth in reserve for the future."^2 Sorgel was similarly enthusiastic about the potential of hydroelectricity. He saw it as the only viable replacement for fossil fuels and was convinced that it could finally put humankind in charge of its own destiny. Water power, he claimed, would be able to supply the energy to transform environments, climates, and continents. And this was exactly what he planned to achieve with Atlantropa. Designed in the late 1920s, the project aimed both at revolutionizing the political landscape of Europe and at engineering a new joint Euro-African supercontinent. An oceanic dam at Gibraltar was to connect Europe to Africa and physically close off the Mediterranean, whose water level would continually fall through excess evaporation. This would provide new land for settlement around the shifted coastlines and, most importantly, create a buildup of potential energy. In Sorgel's calculations, the projected hydropower stations on the dam would satisfy all of Europe's energy demands for centuries to come and provide the necessary energy for the large-scale environmental transformation of the arid regions of North Africa. In an amendment of the project a few years later, Sorgel expanded the already far-reaching plans to include the environmental and climatic transformation of the entire African continent. For Sorgel, the untapped potentials of both hydropower and new space for settlement in Africa were the key to escaping the vicious circle of energy and land scarcity, financial crises, unemployment, political conflict, and wars. The technological transformation of Europe would engender a societal shift--the emergence of not merely a unified Europe, but a new Kulturkreis, a new "cultural sphere."^3 Ultimately, Sorgel's plans failed to materialize. Despite an early enthusiastic reception, the cooperation of some of the most famous modernist architects of the time, and Sorgel's unceasing publicity activity spanning three consecutive German regimes, Atlantropa eventually ended up unrealized and largely forgotten.^4 This was far from a foregone conclusion. In the German and Austrian press alone, the project was featured in more than 450 newspaper, magazine, and journal articles between 1929 and 1933, and it remained in the news and the public imagination until the early 1950s.^5 While the general tenor of the articles was one of awe and astonishment about the scale of Sorgel's ambitions, the project rarely received outright criticism for being technologically overambitious, let alone impossible.^6 For the historian, as well, Atlantropa is of far greater relevance than its disappearance from cultural memory may initially suggest.^7 Sorgel's project represents an exemplary product of a time in which radical solutions appeared to provide the only way out of a seemingly comprehensive crisis, affecting not only the political, economic, and social spheres, but also environmental and climatic conditions. Atlantropa reflected, and fueled, both common environmental anxieties and the promise of technology in the first half of the twentieth century. Alternative--and, most importantly, renewable--energy sources could provide hope that modern industrial societies were not inevitably doomed to falter under the weight of economic crises, social divisions, and an all-encompassing decline, but could instead usher in a new era of stability and peace through the energy-intensive control of climates and the environment.^8 Atlantropa thus stands as a telling indication that long before the oil crises, environmental activism, and global warming debates of the last forty or fifty years, similar issues had already stirred the European imagination and bred related anxieties. Coal exhaustion had been a matter of concern among Scottish improvers as early as the late eighteenth century.^9 In 1865, the persistent apprehensions found one of their most influential expressions in William Stanley Jevons's The Coal Question, which presaged an eventual end to the profitable exploitation of the world's diminishing coal reserves.^10 Despite--or maybe because of--the unabated rate of industrial development in Europe, the concerns carried over into the twentieth century.^11 At the same time, nineteenth-century ideas about enduring climatic changes and their potential to desiccate large swaths of the earth had become ingrained in both scientific and popular debates.^12 These anxieties over economic and environmental decline were closely connected to dark visions of cultural decay, which were becoming particularly fashionable during the crisis-ridden interwar years in Germany. The wide-ranging search for ways to avert disaster led to projects of vast ambition, including the world-altering aspirations of Atlantropa. Sorgel's project did not reflect any of the leading political trends of interwar Germany. Instead, it offered its own distinct outlook on the way out of "the crisis of classical modernity," made up of the social, economic, political, and, not least, environmental disruptions that followed the emergence of industrialized and urbanized societies.^13 With its post-national conception of European unity and the vision of a thoroughly colonized and transformed Africa, Atlantropa was free of any narrow nationalist tint, yet deeply steeped in imperialist rhetoric. Sorgel's views on the scope and role of technology are similarly difficult to categorize. They were evidently not consistent with the volkisch anti-modernism that the classical studies of George Mosse, Kurt Sontheimer, and Fritz Stern identified in interwar Germany; but they also did not neatly conform to the reconciliation between romantic irrational impulses and industrial technology, or what Jeffrey Herf has labeled "reactionary modernism."^14 Sorgel was a modernist of his own making, with an almost limitless belief in technological advances and a similarly strong belief that neither nationalist lore nor traditional models of politics and society held any value for the technocratic and energy-centered society of the future. Atlantropa underscores the eclectic mix of attitudes toward technology that coexisted in the Weimar Republic, far beyond a predetermined techno-political Sonderweg. With his idiosyncratic convictions, Herman Sorgel stands as an example of the multifaceted and rich variety of utopian thought in interwar Germany.^15 To be sure, Sorgel defended himself publicly against allegations of utopianism. The envisaged scale of the project, however, makes his protestations sound unconvincing--at least from today's vantage point: Atlantropa offers an almost bottomless treasure trove filled with fantastic technological and political advances.^16 That the project was not simply dismissed as unrealistic by Sorgel's contemporaries speaks to the continuing belief in large-scale hydroengineering projects sixty years after the opening of the Suez Canal and just a few years before the construction of the Hoover Dam and the establishment of the Tennessee Valley Authority. The TVA was, in fact, a kindred spirit to Atlantropa: in its original form, it was only a little short of Sorgel's project in its aspirations of social engineering. Similar to Atlantropa's aims, the vision for the TVA went far beyond the production of hydropower in attempting to create a new society in the Tennessee Valley, and ultimately a new kind of American citizen.^17 Sorgel had equally ambitious aims, but he believed strongly that his project was imminently practicable and--if somewhat anachronistic terminology be allowed--he might have categorized himself as a "futurologist" rather than a utopian. But even more than that, Sorgel was a commentator on his own time, giving his own personal account of common contemporary anxieties and hopes.^ 18 If Sorgel's most deeply felt anxiety was about cultural and environmental decline, his utopian hope was focused on the exploitation of new energy sources. He considered the technological potential of wind energy, read up on tidal power stations, and examined the possibilities of directly converting sunlight into electricity. The most important form of energy in Atlantropa, however, was water power. Sorgel designed his project at a time when the nineteenth-century promise of coal as the fuel of progress had been cast into doubt by depleted mines and the soot of industrial cities.^19 The first visions of individual mobility and model suburbs fueled by oil were only just beginning to take shape. And like all designs based on fossil fuels, they could not escape the specter of eventual resource exhaustion and environmental pollution. Nuclear power, with its promise of incredibly cheap energy, was still just a distant and unlikely alternative in the 1920s and 1930s. Hydropower became the epitome of the forward-looking, rationally organized energy supply in the interwar years. It was clean and, most importantly, potentially inexhaustible.^20 It also lent itself to visual media, with depictions of giant engineering structures and the attendant continent-spanning networks of power lines capturing the public imagination. Atlantropa's dams around the Mediterranean embodied an all-European, imperialist version of David Nye's "technological sublime."^21 And before the switch from coal to oil in the years and decades following the end of the Second World War that Timothy Mitchell has described, hydropower could already offer the promise of an energy source allegedly free of social conflict and full of potential to fuel continuous economic growth.^22 A theoretically inexhaustible supply of energy--much like new political ideologies--promised a new beginning in a reengineered and climate-controlled Euro-African continent. While Atlantropa will always remain part of the history that never was, it can be instrumental in answering Manu Goswami's recent appeal to historians to pay closer attention to movements, institutions, and categories "perceived as episodic, abortive, or untimely."^23 Failed projects, just like any failed technology, can offer less obvious, but no less important, insights into historical patterns and developments.^24 It is time to reexamine the history of high modernist engineering from a perspective that not only traces the social, political, and environmental consequences of successfully built structures, but also examines the anxieties and hopes attending envisioned energy transitions and their effect on social, political, and environmental futures. Herman Sorgel's Atlantropa project offers a fascinating way into this history of prospects and potentialities. If we can trust Sorgel's own retelling of the story, the idea for Atlantropa came to him as a sudden flash of inspiration in 1927. He had just finished reading a geographical treatise on the Mediterranean that categorized the large body of water as an "evaporation sea," whose water level was maintained only by the constant inflow from the Atlantic Ocean through the Strait of Gibraltar.^25 This rather mundane hydrological detail would provide the basis for Atlantropa's most prominent feature, which was as simple as it was ambitious: a giant concrete barrier connecting Morocco and Spain at Gibraltar. The oversized dam would cut the water supply from the Atlantic Ocean, while somewhat smaller dams at Gallipoli and the Nile estuary would isolate the Mediterranean from other large bodies of water. Through the slow but continual process of evaporation, the water level of the Mediterranean would drop, eventually exposing large swaths of former seabed around the shifted coastline. Sorgel envisioned giant hydropower generators on the dam that would make use of the buildup of potential energy between the now-different water levels of the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. (See Figure 1.) This basic design--"the Mediterranean as Power Plant"--would become the most famous part of the project. The Gibraltar Dam is still the most iconic image of Atlantropa today, although the center of the project would eventually shift southward with the subsequent addition of plans to transform the entire continent of Africa.^26 Figure 1: Map of Atlantropa, 1932. ADM 92. Photo Deutsches Museum. Compliance with permission from the rights holder to display this image online prohibits further enlargement or copying. Map of Atlantropa, 1932. ADM 92. Photo Deutsches Museum. Figure 1: Map of Atlantropa, 1932. ADM 92. Photo Deutsches Museum. Compliance with permission from the rights holder to display this image online prohibits further enlargement or copying. Map of Atlantropa, 1932. ADM 92. Photo Deutsches Museum. From the beginning, Sorgel conceived of his scheme as a revolutionary force that would reorganize and restructure Europe not only in physical, but also in social and political respects. Atlantropa was to become "a new life form of Europe," which would unite the quarreling nations on the continent and redirect their energies from internecine warfare to a great collaborative project.^27 The idea was far from unique in interwar Europe. In fact, international cooperation in the construction of European national power grids had been tried and tested even before the First World War, and became more common thereafter.^28 The second half of the 1920s saw a blossoming of proposals to create an integrated European electricity grid, often advertised not only as a solution to the issues of network efficiency and reliability, but also as a way to unify Europe politically.^29 And even planners with less lofty aims often saw large engineering projects as a solution to economic crises and high unemployment. This way of thinking was present from the left to the right, and from Europe to North America, where it found its arguably best-known expression in New Deal projects.^30 Atlantropa fit well into the time of the Great Depression. The origins of the project, however, reached back further. In 1925, Sorgel had visited the Pan American Union Building in Washington, D.C., and was visibly struck by this tangible manifestation of international cooperation.^31 Another source of inspiration was H. G. Wells's voluminous Outline of History, which Sorgel had read in the mid-1920s. Under the fresh impression of wartime destruction, Wells had criticized the feeble attempts at international cooperation. "What the world needs," he claimed, "is no such league of nations as this nor even a mere league of peoples, but a world league of men."^ 32 Before this end stage of history could become a reality, Wells foresaw associations on a smaller level as steps toward the ultimate goal.^33 Sorgel's later rhetoric about the "three A's"--Asia, America, and the new Afro-European Atlantropa--was similar to Wells's concept of a world divided into large supranational blocs.^34 The resemblances between the two visions went even further. Pondering the future world state, Wells imagined that "[i]ts economic organization will be an exploitation of all natural wealth and every fresh possibility science reveals, by the agents and servants of the common government for the common good."^35 Sorgel displayed a strikingly similar attitude toward technology and the utilization of natural forces in the elaboration of his own plans. Some of the first calculations for Atlantropa estimated that the volume of water inflow from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean at the Strait of Gibraltar equaled about twelve times the amount of water that rushed down the Niagara Falls.^36 To Sorgel, it was incomprehensible why nobody had yet made use of that resource, particularly in light of his assessment that coal prices would constantly rise until the supplies were entirely depleted in a few hundred years.^37 He later estimated that global energy demand was doubling every twenty years, a further illustration of the unsustainable exploitation of coal reserves that he witnessed in the industrialized world.^38 In 1938, his numbers became even more concrete: "The coal of England will run out in 200 years, the coal of Germany in about 350 years," he warned his readers, with a remarkably long-range view to the future of European dominance in the world. And with numbers that were probably aimed at dampening the emergent enthusiasm about oil as a potential replacement for coal, he added that "[t]he fossil oil of the entire earth is only sufficient for about 2 decades."^39 This line of reasoning mirrored more widespread worries about energy shortages that had emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century.^40 Even in such an unlikely place as Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic, the anxiety about finite resources in a world of unrelenting economic and technological progress was evident. "Today this mighty cosmos [of the modern economic order] determines, with overwhelming coercion, the style of life not only of those directly involved in business," Weber wrote in 1905, "but of every individual who is born into this mechanism, and may well continue to do so until the day that the last ton of fossil fuel has been consumed."^41 And when the German geologist Johannes Walther characterized the desert and solar energy as the most promising fields for future energy exploitation in 1912, he referred to the foreboding that "the time will come when the coal mines are depleted and the power from waterfalls is fully used."^42 After the First World War, the German engineer Hermann Honnef proposed the construction of gigantic "wind towers," each higher than the Eiffel Tower, which he depicted in dramatic fashion. Honnef, however, did not attach great utopian hopes for social reorganization to his inventions. His books remained markedly sober, if quantitatively flawed, studies of the unused potential of wind energy and new technologies for its exploitation.^ 43 Water power, by contrast, regularly stirred utopian impulses.^44 "White coal" had become a viable alternative to fossil fuels around the beginning of the twentieth century, when efficient power lines made it possible to transport electricity cheaply from the sites of production to the places of consumption.^45 The engineer behind the Bavarian Walchensee Hydroelectric Power Plant, Oskar von Miller, had played a major role in this development. He conducted the first successful public experiments proving the practicability of the long-distance transmission of electricity in the 1890s.^46 This finding inaugurated a long period of enthusiasm for hydropower, advertised as the solution to both economic and social problems around the turn of the century in Germany and beyond.^47 During and after the First World War, the zeal for hydropower showed few signs of subsiding. It even gained new political urgency with wartime and postwar coal shortages and the subsequent attempts to diversify the electricity mix in order to increase the reliability of networks.^48 Italy, Switzerland, Austria, and the Scandinavian countries led the continent in the development of hydroelectric capacity, but the enthusiasm for this "new" kind of energy was widespread.^49 Far removed from the wooden watermills of the pre-industrial era, hydroelectric power in the twentieth century presented itself as a technology at the forefront of progress: the production sites, with impressive dams and oversized sluices and turbines, were feats of high-tech engineering. Hydropower was advertised as modern, scientific, and inexhaustible. It offered a remedy to the issue of air pollution in and near industrial centers.^ 50 And because of the small staff required to run power stations, it promised to be "practically free from labour troubles," as one participant at the first World Power Conference in 1924 pointed out.^ 51 In contrast to coal extraction, which was heavily decentralized and required large amounts of manpower, hydroelectric power offered fewer opportunities for strikes and the political organization of laborers. This, at least, was the rhetoric of hydropower supporters, who often glossed over the social implications and the growing number of opponents of large water engineering projects.^52 Despite Germany's considerable coal reserves, hydropower remained an important topic of discussion after the First World War.^53 The threat of a French occupation of the Ruhr coalfields only amplified the call for alternative energy sources.^54 In 1927, the engineer Heinrich Voegtle estimated liberally that 70 percent of Germany's energy demand could be satisfied with power generated by water turbines.^55 More sober observers, however, cast a less favorable light on the potential of hydropower. Voegtle's colleague Arthur Lichtenauer had calculated a year earlier that every country in Central Europe had a higher total energy demand than its potential supply of hydropower would be able to meet.^56 His message was clear: water power alone could not make up for future energy shortages caused by the ongoing depletion of coal reserves. Sorgel's calculations were consistent with Lichtenauer's note of caution: in the confines of an unaltered geography, Europe did not have sufficient energy resources to secure its future, let alone compete with the rest of the world. Atlantropa, however, could solve this dilemma, because it would create, rather than simply exploit, potential energy. The first calculations of the capacity of the projected Gibraltar dam foresaw the production of 160 million horsepower (about 120 gigawatts), or "a thousand-fold [increase over] the amount produced at the Walchensee Power Plant" in Bavaria, then Germany's largest hydroelectric power station.^57 For Sorgel, Atlantropa was not simply a welcome source of sufficient energy for centuries to come, but also an assurance against further intra-European conflict. Similar to other supporters of integrated European power grids such as Dannie Heineman, Ernst Schonholzer, and Oskar Oliven, Sorgel argued that "[t]he linking of Europe through power lines is a better guarantee of freedom than pacts on paper," adding that "with the destruction of the lines, every nation [Volk] would self-destruct."^58 Even more than that, hydroelectricity came to signify a promise of survival for a continent that Sorgel, like many of his contemporaries, saw as on the brink of demise after the First World War had shaken the sense of European superiority.^59 In a theme that he would come back to throughout his life, Sorgel insisted on the link between energy and culture: "If Europe does not want to be outflanked by other continents, it has to develop its only large power source--namely the Mediterranean--in a timely manner." Otherwise, he warned, "the cultural center of Europe will vanish as well. Europe would become desolate [veroden], paralyzed; at best it would still retain a fossilized culture, like Egypt or India today."^60 As in most, if not all, utopian visions of the future, the dystopian possibilities were never far off. There was not only the bleak reality of interwar political unrest and economic crisis, which could at any moment take a turn for the worse; there were also larger processes of corrosion, against which Sorgel posited his vision of a radical break with the past. The fear of European decline, so prevalent in interwar Europe, stood at the center of the Atlantropa project. It was an all-encompassing decline that Sorgel feared, in which the attested energy shortage was the symptom of a comprehensive malaise that had taken hold of the continent. Sorgel's mixture of images and terms to describe his project--borrowed both from the repertoire of the natural sciences and from conservative German philosophy--was no accident. The "desolation" of Europe was always both a material and a spiritual threat that manifested itself as environmental and cultural decay. The continent, Sorgel believed, was threatened by desertification of the soil and the mind, and the only way out of this predicament was to expand beyond its geographic borders.^61 This would ensure both new energy sources and an enlarged territory able to relieve the stifling overcrowding of Europe that Sorgel evoked in his publications. Atlantropa offered a simultaneously figurative and literal bridge to a new promised land across the Mediterranean. This new land was the Sahara, itself the result of desertification on an enormous scale, as Sorgel repeated again and again in his writings. Nevertheless, it offered the space, or Lebensraum, that an overpopulated Europe allegedly needed to survive.^62 It also offered a vast testing ground where modern technology could redeem itself by transforming environments and climates after bringing only death and destruction in the First World War. While the projected dam at Gibraltar remained the central symbol of Atlantropa throughout its history, Sorgel soon began to shift his focus farther south. Central to this second stage of Atlantropa was a new collaborator, whom Sorgel had first become acquainted with in 1928.^63 In a reply to a newspaper article on Atlantropa, the Swiss engineer Bruno Siegwart had warned of a whole host of geological and hydrological catastrophes that would follow the construction of the project--including earthquakes, a shift of the earth's axis, and a rise in oceanic levels.^64 In a mysterious volte-face, however, he quickly turned into one of the staunchest supporters of Sorgel's ideas.^65 Completing this remarkable change of heart, Siegwart even started to become personally involved in the project, when he supplied information on hydrological conditions in the southern part of the Mediterranean basin that Sorgel had first requested from the University of Pavia in 1932.^66 Just one year later, Sorgel and Siegwart joined forces to begin work on the second stage of Atlantropa, which foresaw the complete geographical, environmental, and climatic transformation of the African continent. The new plans focused on the damming of the Congo River. According to the projections, this would have created a body of water with a surface area of about 12,000 square kilometers, a volume of 55 cubic kilometers, and--most importantly--the potential capacity for 22.5 to 45 gigawatts of hydropower. The first publication of this proposal in 1935 included not only the plans for the Congo Lake, but also a map showing an enlarged Lake Chad and a third engineered body of water in southern Africa, created through the damming of the Zambezi River.^67 (See Figure 2.) Figure 2: "Development through Formation of Inland Seas." Map drawn by Botho and Hans von Romer, showing the projected Chad, Congo, and Zambezi Seas. The caption reads: "Only through the construction of large water surfaces will Central Africa become habitable for whites. Diseases can be fought, the climate can be ameliorated, and the land can be cultivated." ADM 92. Photo Deutsches Museum. Compliance with permission from the rights holder to display this image online prohibits further enlargement or copying. "Development through Formation of Inland Seas." Map drawn by Botho and Hans von Romer, showing the projected Chad, Congo, and Zambezi Seas. The caption reads: "Only through the construction of large water surfaces will Central Africa become habitable for whites. Diseases can be fought, the climate can be ameliorated, and the land can be cultivated." ADM 92. Photo Deutsches Museum. Figure 2: "Development through Formation of Inland Seas." Map drawn by Botho and Hans von Romer, showing the projected Chad, Congo, and Zambezi Seas. The caption reads: "Only through the construction of large water surfaces will Central Africa become habitable for whites. Diseases can be fought, the climate can be ameliorated, and the land can be cultivated." ADM 92. Photo Deutsches Museum. Compliance with permission from the rights holder to display this image online prohibits further enlargement or copying. "Development through Formation of Inland Seas." Map drawn by Botho and Hans von Romer, showing the projected Chad, Congo, and Zambezi Seas. The caption reads: "Only through the construction of large water surfaces will Central Africa become habitable for whites. Diseases can be fought, the climate can be ameliorated, and the land can be cultivated." ADM 92. Photo Deutsches Museum. Unafraid of large time scales, Sorgel and Siegwart estimated that filling the Congo basin would take "about 133 years."^68 This rather exact "estimate" obscured the ongoing problems that the two collaborators encountered in collecting detailed information on Central Africa: in private correspondence, Siegwart mentioned the lack of data on topography, total evaporation loss, the incidence and volume of exceptional floods, and meteorological information on winds.^69 The shortage of reliable information, however, did not stop Sorgel and Siegwart from pondering the expected effects of the projected reengineering of the African continent. The collected water from the Congo River, they wrote, could be used to cultivate the northern regions of the Sahara, making the new continent of Atlantropa competitive with Asia and America in terms of its exploitable landmass.^70 The plans for a continental makeover based on wholly inadequate data were not simply a consequence of the impaired vision of an assumed state-like entity running into the inherent problems of high modernist planning that James Scott has described.^71 They were made possible, as well, by a particular and pervasive mindset in the interwar years, which combined the widespread pessimism about cultural and environmental decline with a boundless optimism about imminent technological breakthroughs. Sorgel was concerned about what he perceived to be the shortcomings of politics in exploiting new and future technological possibilities: the prevailing political processes, he argued, were outdated and unable to utilize already available tools and expertise to mold nature according to human--and, more specifically, European--needs. Atlantropa's goal was to create new living space for a European population stifled by its lack of room on a cramped continent. Africa, as "the expectant vacuum in front of Europe's doors," was the obvious solution for Sorgel, who rarely even mentioned the fate of the Africans living in that alleged "vacuum."^72 When Sorgel did refer to Africans, he revealed the full extent of his racist notions and his support of environmental genocide. He considered the submersion of a great part of the Congo's inhabited land as a blessing, as it would exclusively harm Africans. Without the project, Sorgel argued, "the Negroes ... would increase in numbers, until they would finally eat everything the land can produce and not export anything anymore."^73 Siegwart expressed similar ideas and put a peculiar spin on the projected environmental changes in Central Africa. He wrote to Sorgel that for the sake of the continued domination of the white race, it would be necessary to destroy landscapes "where only the black can survive."^74 In Sorgel and Siegwart's plans, this required above all the transformation of the hostile climate and the reversal of the progressing desertification that they perceived to be threatening human--or rather white human--existence. The transformation of North Africa into settler land had been part of the earliest plans for the project, but Sorgel now started to gather more detailed information on the history and the environmental conditions of the Sahara. The desert, which had figured so prominently in debates over desiccation and climate change before the First World War, remained a topic of scholarly and public discussion in the early twentieth century.^75 As the largest desert close to Europe, it provided rich images for the construction of a cautionary tale about the extremes of land degradation and climate change. In the 1930s, the British colonial forester Edward Stebbing played a central role in feeding already primed apprehensions about the expansion of deserts. As the former head of the Indian Forest Department, Stebbing had traveled across the British Empire and wrote on what he perceived to be the steady destruction of forests and the growth of deserts all around the world. In "The Encroaching Sahara," one of his most-discussed lectures, he argued for an anthropogenic cause of environmental decline in alarmist terms: "Overgrazing and hacking in the forest that is left, annual burning, and sand invasion suggest the question: How long before the desert supervenes?"^76 Stebbing was not a lone voice in the wilderness. Looking back on his work for the large compendium An African Survey, the Cambridge biologist E. Barton Worthington remembered that the study was concerned above all with "the changing scene of Africa."^77 This included what he called "the southern creep of arid conditions."^78 Nor did the fears over encroaching deserts remain restricted to the British Isles. They found their way across the Channel and into the popular press in Germany. One newspaper reported in 1935 on the "alarming news" about "the inexorable advance of the desert to Europe," adding the common suggestion that "the reclamation of the Sahara as a place for settlement is one of the most gigantic tasks of our century."^79 Perhaps unsurprisingly, this newspaper article made it into the collection of clippings on topics related to Atlantropa that Sorgel meticulously kept up to date through most of his life. While Sorgel never seemed to have any substantial doubts about the feasibility or eventual success of his project, he knew that he had to convince others--and one way to do this was to play on fears of climatic decline and at the same time offer a possible solution. The last big transformation that Atlantropa envisioned was one of engineered climate change. Sorgel and Siegwart argued that the manmade lakes in Africa would increase the rate of evaporation and thus precipitation.^80 This, Sorgel contended, would moderate the climate of the continent and allow for a "healthier life" for the anticipated European settlers.^81 "The Granary of Rome" would finally be restored.^82 Here, Sorgel was following in the footsteps of the French engineer Francois Roudaire, who had already come up with a similar plan in the 1870s: his mer interieur--an explicit model for Sorgel--foresaw the inundation of desert depressions at the border of Tunisia and Algeria and the subsequent moderation of the climate.^83 Sorgel's sub-project of an inland sea in southern Africa was also reminiscent of the 1920s scheme developed by the South African engineer Ernest Schwarz to transform the Kalahari into agricultural land.^84 The proposition that large bodies of water changed the local climate had become generally accepted after observations related to large manmade reservoirs in the nineteenth century.^85 Roudaire and his supporters had already used this rationale in the 1870s and 1880s. After the French engineer's death, the idea of engineered climate change survived, periodically reappeared in similar projects, and became part of the standard repertoire in the literature on deserts.^86 A 1925 article published in a German popular science magazine called deserts "the biggest heat squanderers" on earth and mentioned the need for "big evaporation surfaces of hundreds of thousands of square kilometers" to bring rain to desert valleys, and especially the surrounding mountains.^87 If reservoirs changed the climatic conditions in their immediate surroundings, the reasoning went, then very large reservoirs would be able to change the climate of far larger areas, or maybe even continents. The belief that technology used on a grand scale could alter not only local environments but also atmospheric phenomena and macroclimatic conditions offered an entirely new outlook on what the field of meteorology would include in the future: active climate transformation seemed to have moved into the realm of the possible.^ 88 A 1927 book on this subject called weather manipulation "the supreme issue of practical meteorology."^89 The technological tools available to engineers now made it possible to think about modifying and moderating extreme climatic conditions, like those found in deserts or tropical forests. And "practical meteorology" did not look only at the extreme environments of overseas climes. European climates became targets of improvement projects, as well. Sorgel made use of this new "field" of applied meteorology in his propaganda for Atlantropa. In an aside in his first major publication on the project, he cited Paul von Sokolowski's apocalyptic vision in Die Versandung Europas (The Sanding-Up of Europe), which argued for a cultural-environmental danger emanating from Russia.^90 Apparently infected by Sokolowski's opaque language, Sorgel wrote that "while the sanding-up of Europe by Russia may be exaggerated when analyzed in isolation," it was still "significant in the synthetic context of the entire course of worldly events, and would certainly play a conspicuous role in the coming organization of Europe."^91 Sorgel did not shed any more light on the meaning of this statement, but he was clearly concerned about climatic conditions and environmental changes in Europe from the early days of Atlantropa, not least because of the common criticism that his project could cause detrimental climatic shifts in Europe.^92 Sorgel simply turned the argument on its head. In his first article on the project, he had already referred to the beneficial effects that the project would have on the reclaimed land around the Mediterranean basin--in North Africa as well as in southern Europe. Without giving much explanation of the causal connections between the engineering work and attendant climatic changes, he wrote that "an extremely fertile plain with a mild climate would extend from Italy to the Balkans."^93 In 1932, he went into more detail, trying to allay the fear that damming the Mediterranean would change the climate for the worse in Europe. This was a response to criticism that lowering the water level would lead to an increase in atmospheric pressure, and ultimately to an unpredictable shift in the high-pressure areas over the Azores that would significantly influence the European climate. Sorgel argued not only that the change in atmospheric pressure would probably not be big enough to have any discernible effect, but also that--in the unlikely case that it did--the change would have positive effects on the climate of northern Europe, which was "very much in need of improvement."^94 Moreover, Sorgel wrote, the dam at Gibraltar would actually help to increase the power of the Gulf Stream. His reasoning was that the concrete barrier between Spain and Morocco would cut off a cold undercurrent flowing from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, which was counteracting the stream of warm water from the Gulf of Mexico. Without this undercurrent, the Gulf Stream would speed up and flow farther to the east, thus making northern Europe, "with its unfriendly climate," warmer and wetter.^95 In a newspaper article the following year, Sorgel expanded on this idea. Without any hard evidence but with all the more conviction, he alleged that Europe was actually in the process of cooling down: "If we want to have any sun at all or experience a spring with flowering trees, we have to move southward." There was still one other possible solution: with the help of modern technology, he wrote, the climate of northern Europe could be improved, and the Gulf Stream could be shifted back to its "original, direct course."^96 Once again, Sorgel argued for the restoration of the environment to its allegedly "original state." This time, however, the intervention would not counteract the ongoing desiccation, as in northern Africa, but would offset the supposed cooling of the European climate.^97 In these descriptions, the power of modern technology to mold a tarnished and declining nature always featured as an almost limitless force. According to Sorgel's vision, technology was in no way opposed to nature. It was a tool in the hands of engineers, who could use it to repair environmental damage and to look for possible improvements in line with natural conditions. Describing the projected reservoirs and power stations in the area of the Adriatic Sea, Sorgel emphasized that Atlantropa was simply following a path laid out by nature itself: "With the Dalmatian Islands," he wrote, "nature has already built the elongated dams required for reservoirs. Man only has to finish this work in the spirit of nature."^98 Despite the enormous geological and climatic changes that Atlantropa would engender, Sorgel never saw his project as a radical or violent operation. Atlantropa simply made use of hidden natural potentials. The engineer's task was not to force his will on nature, but rather to "utilize the powers of nature."^99 In practice this meant a careful analysis of the physical world, a search for evidence of prior environmental conditions and favorable natural features, and finally the use of the full force of modern technology to transform the earth according to human designs, but always within the limits of natural precedent. "Nature is more powerful than man," Sorgel wrote, but "[t] he engineer can 'correct' [korrigieren] nature."^100 While this interpretation might appear to indicate that Sorgel held a rather cautious and limited view of technology's power, the sheer scale of Atlantropa makes it obvious that such was not the case. Sorgel's belief in technology was, in fact, virtually boundless. Whenever issues were raised about the viability of the project, he simply referred to the incessant march of technological progress, which he believed would take care of the problems. When his collaborator Siegwart asked about the necessity of a protective weir in front of the dam at Gibraltar to protect against possible geological disasters or military attacks that would breach the edifice and lead to catastrophic flooding of the reclaimed land in the Mediterranean basin, Sorgel seemed unfazed: "One should presume a future construction material," he wrote in a note, "that will render the 'protective dam' superfluous."^101 Sorgel's published writings also contained repeated remarks about future solutions to the technical problems of the project, be they the energy-efficient desalinization of seawater for irrigation purposes or the construction of additional dams around the Mediterranean.^102 Whenever these issues became pertinent, he argued, technological development would undoubtedly catch up and present a solution. Figure 3: Herman Sorgel in the office of the New York Times, n.d. ADM 92. Photo Deutsches Museum. Compliance with permission from the rights holder to display this image online prohibits further enlargement or copying. Herman Sorgel in the office of the New York Times, n.d. ADM 92. Photo Deutsches Museum. Figure 3: Herman Sorgel in the office of the New York Times, n.d. ADM 92. Photo Deutsches Museum. Compliance with permission from the rights holder to display this image online prohibits further enlargement or copying. Herman Sorgel in the office of the New York Times, n.d. ADM 92. Photo Deutsches Museum. In this way, Sorgel saw technology as an independent force that developed irrespective of human intentions. "We do not change technology," he wrote in 1938, "we have to change ourselves."^103 This dictum contained a rather explicit criticism of the state of social and political conditions that had not caught up with technological progress. In Sorgel's view, the gap between the two was blatantly obvious: Politically, we still live in a Europe that in its basic outlines took shape in the age of the horse-drawn carriage. This constitutes an internal contradiction to our cars, airplanes, and turbines, to our weapons. If this contradiction is not resolved, the Occident will fall. Ultimately, only technology can resolve the contradiction.^104 The feeling that something was fundamentally wrong with modern society was unmistakably widespread in the interwar years in Europe, and especially in Germany.^105 The most popular prophet of this cultural pessimism during the Weimar period was the philosopher Oswald Spengler, whose 1918 Decline of the West became hugely influential for a whole generation of German thinkers.^106 Spengler's vision of history was one of inevitable catastrophe. Cultures, like human beings, had a life cycle: they grew up, became powerful, and then declined until they died and vanished. Europe had already reached the phase of old age, and the Untergang, the demise, was near. Sorgel knew Spengler personally and incorporated his fellow Munich resident's theories into Atlantropa publications.^107 He referred to Spengler's oft-cited Raubtier Mensch, or "human beast of prey," in describing the destructive tendencies of mankind, illustrated all too well by the First World War.^108 Even the very motto of Atlantropa--"either decline of the Occident or Atlantropa as a turning point and new goal"--directly cited Spengler and replicated the common Weimar penchant for stark binary choices.^109 Sorgel, however, had an idiosyncratic way of reading and interpreting Spengler's works, whose arguments often proved to be quite elliptical.^110 Spengler's 1931 publication Man and Technology, his only half-successful attempt at clarifying some of his more obscure lines of thought, nevertheless contains one of the more unambiguous, and deeply pessimistic, statements on technology: "The struggle against nature is hopeless, and yet it will be waged until the end."^ 111 There could hardly be an assertion more diametrically opposed to Sorgel's ardent belief in technology's potential to transform not only nature, but culture as well. Spengler and Sorgel also differed in their evaluation of a technological vision of the world. Spengler lamented the rationalistic and utilitarian view of nature: "One does not see a waterfall anymore without converting it into electricity in one's mind."^112 What the philosopher saw as an ominous sign of cultural decline, the architect embraced with enthusiasm as a sign of a new age: Sorgel touted the vision of the Mediterranean Sea as a power station not as the last vestige of a declining European culture, but as the heart of an emerging Atlantropan society. The intellectual distance between the two men was clearly apparent, too, in their respective views of environmental change: Spengler saw "changes in climate that threaten the agriculture of entire populations" as a deleterious effect of the ascendancy of technology, while Sorgel acknowledged anthropogenic desertification, but sought to fight and reverse it by technological means.^113 Sorgel countered Spengler's famous dictum "Optimism is cowardice" with an unwavering belief in technology's potential to save humanity. ^114 It was through large-scale engineering and the production of enormous quantities of energy, he contended optimistically, that Europe could be transformed into a new cultural and political entity. ^115 To be sure, Spengler also had his own more optimistic moments, especially during his halfhearted attempts to synchronize his ideas with the political project of the reactionary right in Germany.^116 But this politicized version of his outlook on the future of occidental culture became embroiled in the volkisch ideas of his most avid readers among the right wing of the political spectrum. Sorgel, in contrast, stuck to a pan-European model of technological development. In fact, the cooperation of European states was an important precondition for the successful construction of the gigantic engineering structures of Atlantropa. Sorgel's project never attempted to conserve or strengthen any existing cultural and political structures, and his vision operated completely outside the confines of what could even generously be called volkisch, nationalist, or reactionary. Sorgel undoubtedly counted among the German cultural critics of the interwar years, but--in contrast to some of his better-known contemporaries--he put technology above any and all political concerns.^117 Perhaps unsurprisingly, Sorgel was drawn to the cosmopolitan technocratic movement, which had made its presence felt in Germany by the early 1930s.^118 In the theories, he found a congenial set of ideas that complemented and supported his plans for a technological reorganization of Europe. He quickly became involved in the movement himself, writing the foreword for the German version of Wayne Parrish's main oeuvre, An Outline of Technocracy, published in 1933.^ 119 Among the most prominent American technocrats, Parrish found a particularly receptive climate in the United States after the onset of the Great Depression. The main tenet of the movement was the complete reorganization of society, the removal of politicians from positions of power and their replacement with experts, namely engineers and scientists. Another aspect of this shakeup aimed at replacing monetary ways of measuring value with a form of economic energetics that had been developed by the founder of the technocratic movement, Howard Scott.^120 Parrish, for his part, emphasized the idea that civilization was built upon energy and that any attempt to understand the economy's structure had to take this fact into account: only energy could serve as an objective measurement of work and value.^121 These ideas of the centrality of energy and the power of technology were very close to Sorgel's own concerns, and they also held great sway in interwar Germany. Sorgel's boundless confidence in engineering solutions was only the heightened reflection of a widespread belief that technology could overcome economic, political, and social crises.^122 It may thus not be too surprising that the greatest concern for critics of Atlantropa was the political challenge of European cooperation that the project posed, not its technological requirements. And even those critics who warned about unintended environmental effects, such as earthquakes, water salinization, and floods, usually did not question the basic viability of the project.^123 The prolific author Richard Hennig, for example, described Sorgel's engineered lakes as an idea that would be "technologically feasible at not too exorbitant a price, but that must nevertheless be eschewed for the time being, because the induced changes would be of an all too radical kind."^124 The author Eugen Diesel, the son of the inventor of the Diesel engine, gave a similar assessment of Sorgel's engineering scheme: "There is no doubt that sooner or later humanity will launch and implement projects such as Atlantropa," he wrote. "Atlantropa is therefore not utopian, but answers to an inexorable course of development."^125 This "inexorable development," however, was called into question with the Nazis' rise to power in 1933. After the election of Adolf Hitler and the subsequent rapid dismantling of the Weimar Republic, the most immediate challenge for the Atlantropa project was adapting to a new political system. Despite his post-nationalist leanings, Sorgel immediately attempted to adjust to the new situation. He had always been more an "Atlantropist" than a party follower of any stripe. While he actively promoted European cooperation and collaboration, he had also tried to garner the support of fascist Italy in the late 1920s. Mussolini informed Sorgel through the Italian consulate that he was following the project with "great interest," but he did not follow up on his note.^126 Once the Nazis seized power in Germany, Sorgel--like so many of his compatriots at the time--lay low for a while and then revealed a great knack for opportunism, peppering his propaganda with bits and pieces of Nazi ideology. His 1938 publication Die drei grossen "A" marked the culmination of his effort to curry favor with the new German leadership. The subtitle of the book highlighted "Greater Germany and the Italian Empire" as "[t]he pillars of Atlantropa." Introduced by a Hitler quote from Mein Kampf on the importance of setting the right goals in planning, The Three Great "A's" voiced the hope that the two fascist countries would become "the womb of Atlantropa."^127 At first this strategy seemed to pay off. Sorgel was in contact with officials in the Reichsstelle fur Raumordnung, an office entrusted with the rather nebulous task of ordering and planning the space of the German Reich.^128 The Reichsstelle was aware of Sorgel's ideas and commissioned him in 1941 to investigate the energy supply of Europe and its "spatial relations" to Atlantropa.^129 This was at a time when the Nazi leadership was scrambling for a reorganization of the electricity sector, having realized that its ambitious goal of energy autarky was becoming increasingly unattainable under war conditions.^130 Nothing ever came of this proposed collaboration, and eventually the Nazis lost all interest, which had in any event been lukewarm at best. Atlantropa was just too far removed from Nazi ideas of a new European order under German leadership. The main difference between the projects, however, was geopolitical. Sorgel, like Nazi planners, thought in unprecedented dimensions about the use of large-scale technology to effect enormous spatial and environmental transformations in imperial contexts.^131 Also like Nazi planners, he referred to a "European eastern problem" and called for "a rampart against the East." But beyond diagnosing the problem, he was not interested in the "Asiatic steppes and marshes" that would become the focus of Nazi policies. He argued that the goal of Germany had to be "a place in the sun" and the expansion of territory and power in a north-south direction.^132 During the Nazi period, Sorgel realized quickly that his focus on Africa as the future colonial territory did not sit well with the Nazi leadership. He tried to promote the advantages of his project, referring to the geopolitical importance of a north-south expanse for food production and access to raw materials, and thus for autarky.^133 In his private notes and manuscripts, Sorgel voiced outspoken criticism of Nazi plans in the East. He chastised eastward expansion as "absurd and unnatural" and ultimately futile.^134 In a published article, he warned of "the danger of an Islamic world empire" if Europe did not actively claim and colonize Africa.^135 Interestingly, he also warned of a "yellow peril" from the East as early as 1931, but did not prescribe the same remedy here. India, China, and Japan, Sorgel argued, were "hostile to the [white] race." The solution was to counter the rising influence of Asia with a powerful union of Africa and Europe.^136 Russia, the focal point of colonial policies under the Nazis, was another case altogether. Probably following some of Sokolowski's arguments, Sorgel did not see any hope of change or transformation.^137 He described Russia as unable "to create culture [Kulturschaffung]" and argued that "for all intents and deepest purposes, Russia is and remains infertile, negative, depressed, nihilistic."^138 The engineered transformations that would be able to create Atlantropa out of the sea and the desert, Sorgel seemed to contend, would be powerless against Russian nature. While the totalizing approach to creating a new man in a new, transformed environment was thus a point of commonality between Sorgel and the Nazi leaders, the geopolitical differences were too great to overcome for a meaningful rapprochement. The German attack on Poland and the subsequent occupation and attempted transformation of areas in the East revealed the depth of the ideological fault lines. Even worse for Atlantropa's prospects was that Sorgel ultimately fell completely out of favor with the Nazi leadership. In an environment of ever more restrictive policies on the freedom of speech during wartime, the Propaganda Ministry prohibited the planned publication of Sorgel's latest treatise on Atlantropa in 1942, and later banned the author from disseminating any of his writings.^139 On February 17, 1943, the Gestapo proscribed any propaganda activity on behalf of Atlantropa.^140 Ultimately, the pacifist ideas of European unity and cooperation so ingrained in Atlantropa were too far removed from Nazi goals during the Second World War. In an unpublished and undated note, Sorgel complained about the "hostility, antagonism, and persecution" that the Atlantropa plans had faced since 1933, although he still ended this grievance with a quotation from Hitler.^141 Sorgel never gave up on the project and waited out his time to the end of the war. True to his role as a political chameleon, he immediately tried to take advantage of the new situation in 1945. He cooperated with the Allied forces stationed in Germany and chastised Nazi policies. He did, however, remain distrustful of democracy. When he called for a world government composed of an eclectic mix of representatives, including Winston Churchill, Jan Christiaan Smuts, George Bernard Shaw, Thomas Mann, and Albert Einstein, he was sure to emphasize that their role would be to "demand and dictate" rather than "propose or plead."^142 In unpublished notes, Sorgel added others to his list of an eclectic "council of twelve" that would prepare the world for Atlantropa, among them Pope Pius XII, Truman, Stalin, Nehru, Mao, Robert Schuman, and--less expected among these names--the Austrian journalist Anton Zischka.^143 Zischka, who had served the Third Reich's propaganda efforts, had developed ideas that were compatible with Sorgel's vision of the world.^144 As early as 1938, he had explicitly cited Sorgel's plans as a "great goal" for the future.^145 After the war, Zischka became more closely allied with the ideas of Atlantropa, culminating in the 1951 publication of a book that proposed a combined "Eurafrica" as an escape from the destructive East-West tensions that had been building up since the end of the war.^146 He referred to Atlantropa once again in the context of a supposedly imminent "climate war" (Klimakrieg), in which the engineered Congo Lake would play an important role by counterbalancing similar Soviet projects.^147 Zischka was most likely referring to the eponymous project of the Russian water engineer Mitrofan Davydov, also known as the River Diversion Project. The scheme foresaw the rerouting of rivers in Siberia and the creation of an inland sea the size of West Germany that would provide enormous amounts of energy and moderate the hostile climate in the region.^148 The project became a topic of discussion in Germany in 1950, as the press played up fears that German prisoners of war would be used as the labor force for the construction.^149 Sorgel used the plan's publicity to advertise his own, similar project, and he highlighted the allegedly far superior design of Atlantropa.^150 In the end, however, it was the Soviet Union that went ahead with large hydroengineering schemes after the Second World War. Europe remained politically divided and gradually lost its imperial hold over Africa, making the far-reaching plans of Atlantropa all but impossible. The slow development of a united (Western) Europe would eventually take a far less spectacular form than Sorgel had envisioned. Despite Sorgel's best propaganda efforts--including a script for an Atlantropa movie and a volume of poems about the project--the Euro-African continent remained unrealized.^151 When Sorgel died in a bicycle accident in 1952, Atlantropa quickly vanished from public debates. This was not only due to the fact that Sorgel and his postwar Atlantropa Institute had always been more or less a one-man operation. The quick demise of the project also reflected a more general turn away from some of the central tenets of Atlantropa. While large-scale engineering remained a common response to social and environmental issues; while dams and hydroelectric power stations continued to be built around the world; and while hydropower capacity continued to rise steadily in the second half of the twentieth century, "white coal" had lost some of its power to inspire great utopian visions in the West.^152 Atomic energy now took that place. Like hydropower, nuclear power promised clean and almost limitless energy, but it could do this with the dynamism of novelty and untried optimism.^153 Sorgel sensed this trend very early on and began to write rather desperate polemics against the use of nuclear power, highlighting the potentially destructive power of nuclear technology and the difficulties of obtaining exploitable energy from atomic processes.^154 Even more problematic for Atlantropa was its awkward fit with the new postwar order, dominated by the growing tensions between East and West and the rise of African independence movements. And when an integrated power grid started to take shape in Europe after the war, it was through a long process of negotiations, pilot projects, and regulation, rather than a revolutionary, centralized project of vast proportions.^155 Although Atlantropa's vision for a hydropower-fueled new order faded, the project endured in other ways. While most of Sorgel's ideas remained remarkably stable and unchanged over the years, he did put increasing emphasis on aspects of climate change--both "natural" and engineered. When writing about his project after the Second World War, he emphasized climate modification as a force to pacify the world: One day it will be hard to comprehend how impotent we once were ... when the climate of the earth will have been improved by surprisingly simple and elementary means, and thus the overexcited nerves of all against all will be calmed.^156 During the 1930s, Sorgel had continued to deepen his knowledge of climate change and climate modification. He collected articles and read up on the potential of increased carbon dioxide concentrations to warm the troposphere--an idea that was only just coming back into fashion after Svante Arrhenius's findings had been largely forgotten, ignored, or dismissed for some decades.^157 Enlarging on earlier ideas, Sorgel wrote notes on climatic conditions in Africa, highlighting the continuing growth of the Sahara and remarking that desiccation was a natural process that had been "sped up enormously by the lack of judgment and the greed of humans."^158 He also familiarized himself with current ideas of climate modification that Nazi planners tried out in both Germany and the occupied areas in the East.^159 In the postwar years, Sorgel modified his Atlantropa propaganda by emphasizing ideas on engineered climate change, which proved to have staying power even after the demise of the project.^160 The main goal of Atlantropa remained the accommodation of European settlers in Africa, but now the emphasis shifted almost entirely from desert irrigation to the "improvement of the climate" as the most important precondition for this colonial endeavor.^161 Through his collaborator, the engineer and autodidactic Faust scholar Karl Theens, Sorgel got hold of Anton Metternich's The Desert Threatens, an apocalyptic warning of global desertification and food shortage.^ 162 The book, according to Sorgel's reading, was really "nothing other than a call for Atlantropa," and there were indeed common themes in the diagnosis of a looming disaster for occidental culture and the appeal for quick and concerted action to avert catastrophe.^ 163 Only radical measures and the engineered transformation of large-scale climatic conditions, Sorgel argued, could avert the realization of Metternich's fears about advancing deserts.^164 Theens advised Sorgel to put less emphasis on desiccation and water management in his arguments for Atlantropa. The "dry period theory," he wrote in a letter, had become somewhat of an "April Fool's joke," and the time for this line of reasoning had passed.^165 In his own Atlantropa publication, however, Theens did not hesitate to write about climate himself, mentioning among other things his own idea of installing huge air-conditioning systems in Africa to make the continent habitable for Europeans.^166 The issue of changing climates in both senses--as a threat to the environment and as a field for the future application of modern technology--was central to the utopian circle around Sorgel. It was through the transformation of desertified land that Atlantropa would create the precondition for the survival of occidental culture. And this process was also closely connected to--and in fact dependent on--the availability of large amounts of cheap electricity, which would be supplied by a renewable source of energy. It is this familiar-sounding argument that not only made Atlantropa relevant from the late 1920s to the early 1950s, but also could make the project seem precocious and prophetic. Atlantropa may even look like an anticipation of current large-scale schemes to produce "green" electricity, such as the DESERTEC project, which seeks to create an integrated European-North African "super-grid" around solar-thermal power plants in the Sahara.^167 Sorgel's project, however, was very much a child of its time. Not only was it marked by a proclivity for renewable energy and anxiety over climate change; it was marked, as well, by the limitless belief in the capacity of technology to solve all social, political, and environmental problems, by the blind faith in large-scale planning, the trust in authoritarian rule, and a strict adherence to visions of imperial and racist domination. These two sides of the story were not necessarily contradictory and did, in fact, go hand in hand. The energy-intensive and imperially fueled industrial revolution had led both to a growing belief in the power and reach of technology and to a rising awareness of the environmental changes and the costs of human activity. Herman Sorgel's Atlantropa project was a fascinating expression of this dialectic. And yet, the African air is not conditioned today. The Mediterranean is still a sea. The Congo is still a river. And Europe and Africa never fused into Atlantropa. Sorgel's project remained a utopian vision, and it might be tempting to dismiss the whole episode as a somewhat peculiar footnote to history. That, however, would not do justice to either Atlantropa or its supporters. Sorgel's belief in the absolute primacy of technology and his ideas about environmental and climatic transformation on a gigantic scale undoubtedly struck a chord. While the project was criticized and frequently found to be unrealistic, it was more than just the utopian dream of an overly ambitious German architect with a marked God complex. As inflated as the scale of Atlantropa was, it also reflected--and refracted--many of the public and academic discussions of the first half of the twentieth century. In both trying to solve the pressing issues of the time and attempting to convince as many people as possible of his vision, Sorgel incorporated an eclectic array of current strains of thought into his Atlantropa propaganda. Once completed, the project would purportedly solve the issues of parliamentary democracy, political division, geopolitical imbalances, and overpopulation in one fell swoop. As such, Atlantropa stands as a striking example of both the wide range of political convictions and attitudes toward technology in interwar Germany and the still-understudied history of the unrealized utopian projects of high modernism. As a climate engineering project, Atlantropa also represents an expression of lesser-known environmental issues and fears in the first half of the twentieth century that--in altered form--are still with us today.^168 It shows that these anxieties were part and parcel of the high modernist mindset, which was not exclusively founded upon an optimistic vision of the capacity of large-scale technology. Rather than being a lone visionary voice, Sorgel tapped into popular debates on energy shortages and climatic variations that were already well under way by the 1920s. The notion that the earth was not immutable and that environmental conditions could drastically change had become widespread after persistent discussions among geologists around the turn of the century. Sorgel, however, used the concept of changing climates not simply to explain processes of environmental decline, but also to justify his own project of climate engineering. If changes in macroclimatic conditions could have either natural or anthropogenic causes, what reason was there not to attempt to actively alter climates in a desired direction? And with the new reach and scale of industrial engineering, what reason was there not to attempt to change climates on a continental, or even planetary, scale? With this approach to "fixing" the global environment with the full force of modern technology, Sorgel also stands as one of the ideological forefathers of today's geoengineering schemes to halt and possibly reverse global warming.^169 I am grateful to David Blackbourn, Lorraine Daston, Alison Frank Johnson, Ian Miller, Harriet Ritvo, and Emma Rothschild for their insightful feedback on different drafts of this article. I have also benefited from the perceptive comments and suggestions of participants in various conferences and workshops, including the "Energy and Environment" workshop at the Center for History and Economics at Harvard University, the Annual Meeting of the American Historical Society in Madison, and the Fishbein Workshop in the History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Chicago. The archival research for this article was generously funded by the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD) and a CLIR Mellon Fellowship. Finally, I would like to thank the AHR editors, the editorial staff, and my anonymous reviewers for their invaluable input and assistance. ^1"Die Welt ohne Kohle," Sonntags-Zeitung, October 4, 1936, Archive of the Deutsches Museum, Munich, Nachlass [Papers] #92: Herman Sorgel [hereafter ADM NL 92]/Folder 194. All translations are mine unless otherwise indicated. ^2Henri Cavailles, La houille blanche (Paris, 1922), 215. ^3Herman Sorgel, Atlantropa (Zurich, 1932), 71. Sorgel adopted the anti-evolutionary stance and the diffusionist model of cultural development laid out in the Kulturkreislehre, an ethnological theory that had first been developed (and later dismissed) by the German ethnologist and archaeologist Leo Frobenius in the late nineteenth century, and had then been taken up by the so-called Vienna School of ethnology in the early twentieth century. See Markus Joch, "Deutsche Anti-Evolutionisten? Konzeptionen der Kulturkreislehre um 1900," in Alexander Honold and Klaus R. Scherpe, eds., Das Fremde: Reiseerfahrungen, Schreibformen und kulturelles Wissen, 2nd ed. (Bern, 2003), 77-96. ^4Among the architects who were actively involved with Atlantropa were Erich Mendelsohn, Peter Behrens, Lois Welzenbacher, Hans Dollgast, and Fritz Hoger. ^5The collection of newspaper clippings about Atlantropa is spread out over various folders in the archive of the Deutsches Museum, with most of them in ADM NL 92/189 to 92/201. Many of the clippings do not include page numbers and lack other bibliographical information as well. See also Alexander Gall, Das Atlantropa-Projekt: Die Geschichte einer gescheiterten Vision. Herman Sorgel und die Absenkung des Mittelmeers (Frankfurt a.M., 1998), 38. Atlantropa also inspired a whole line of fiction from the late 1920s to the early 1950s; see Menno Spiering, "Engineering Europe: The European Idea in Interbellum Literature, the Case of Panropa," in Michael J. Wintle and Menno Spiering, eds., Ideas of Europe since 1914: The Legacy of the First World War (Houndmills, 2002), 177-199. The most famous Atlantropa novel, Power for Sale (New York, 1939), was written in English by the Swiss author John Knittel; it was translated into German as Amadeus (Berlin, 1939). ^6See Alexander Gall, "Atlantropa: A Technological Vision of a United Europe," in Erik van der Vleuten and Arne Kaijser, eds., Networking Europe: Transnational Infrastructures and the Shaping of Europe, 1850-2000 (Sagamore Beach, Mass., 2006), 99-128, here 99-100. ^7In the late 1990s, Atlantropa emerged out of oblivion in Germany. In their respective studies, Alexander Gall and Wolfgang Voigt analyzed Atlantropa in the context of early plans for European unification and the history of modernist architecture in Germany; see Gall, Das Atlantropa-Projekt; Voigt, Atlantropa: Weltbauen am Mittelmeer, ein Architektentraum der Moderne (Hamburg, 1998). The project has not yet received much attention in the English-speaking world. For the most in-depth English-language account of Atlantropa and its political aims, see Gall, "Atlantropa." ^8With its focus on electricity as a unifying force, Atlantropa did not stand alone in interwar Europe. For an account of other ideas for large international energy projects, see Vincent Lagendijk, "'To Consolidate Peace'? The International Electro-Technical Community and the Grid for the United States of Europe," Journal of Contemporary History 47, no. 2 (2012): 402-426; Lagendijk, Electrifying Europe: The Power of Europe in the Construction of Electricity Networks (Amsterdam, 2008), chaps. 1-3. On the long history of the idea of decline in European culture, see Peter Burke, "Tradition and Experience: The Idea of Decline from Bruni to Gibbon," Daedalus 105, no. 3 (1976): 137-152; Arthur Herman, The Idea of Decline in Western History (New York, 1997). ^9See Fredrik Albritton Jonsson, Enlightenment's Frontier: The Scottish Highlands and the Origins of Environmentalism (New Haven, Conn., 2013), chap. 7. ^10See W. Stanley Jevons, The Coal Question: An Inquiry Concerning the Progress of the Nation, and the Probable Exhaustion of Our Coal-Mines (London, 1865). ^11On the origins and impact of Jevons's calculations, see Nuno Luis Madureira, "The Anxiety of Abundance: William Stanley Jevons and Coal Scarcity in the Nineteenth Century," Environment and History 18, no. 3 (2012): 395-421; Rolf Peter Sieferle, The Subterranean Forest: Energy Systems and the Industrial Revolution (Cambridge, 2001), 197-202. ^12Nico Stehr and Hans von Storch speak of a "disappearance" of the nineteenth-century climate change debate in the first decades of the twentieth century; Stehr and von Storch, Klima, Wetter, Mensch (1999; repr., Opladen, 2010), 79. Despite a waning of interest, however, the debate on progressive and periodic climate changes continued. For three examples of articles from the 1920s in French, English, and German, see C. Riviere, "L'invariabilite du climat en Afrique du Nord depuis le debut de la periode historique," Revue d'histoire naturelle appliquee 1 (1920): 71-79, 136-140, 163-176, 197-202, 234-238, 263-267, 302-304; Ellsworth Huntington and Stephen Sargent Visher, Climatic Changes: Their Nature and Causes (New Haven, Conn., 1922); Paul Kessler, Das Klima der jungsten geologischen Zeiten und die Frage einer Klimaanderung in der Jetztzeit (Stuttgart, 1923). ^13This term is borrowed from Detlev J. K. Peukert, The Weimar Republic: The Crisis of Classical Modernity, trans. Richard Deveson (London, 1991). ^14See George L. Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich (New York, 1964); Kurt Sontheimer, Antidemokratisches Denken in der Weimarer Republik: Die politischen Ideen des deutschen Nationalismus zwischen 1918 und 1933 (Munich, 1962); Fritz Richard Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology (Berkeley, Calif., 1961); Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge, 1984). For a critique of the terms "antimodernism" and "reactionary modernism" as used in the preceding works, see Thomas Rohkramer, "Antimodernism, Reactionary Modernism and National Socialism: Technocratic Tendencies in Germany, 1890-1945," Contemporary European History 8, no. 1 (1999): 29-50. ^15On this topic, see Thomas Rohkramer, Eine andere Moderne? Zivilisationskritik, Natur und Technik in Deutschland, 1880-1933 (Paderborn, 1999); Rudiger Graf, Die Zukunft der Weimarer Republik: Krisen und Zukunftsaneignungen in Deutschland, 1918-1933 (Munich, 2008). Graf's voluminous study reveals that the discourses on the future in the Weimar Republic were marked above all by widely varying proposals about means and ends. ^16Atlantropa belies the "twilight of utopia" label that Frank E. Manuel and Fritzie P. Manuel assigned to the turn of the twentieth century in their classic study Utopian Thought in the Western World (Cambridge, Mass., 1979). ^17Arthur E. Morgan, the TVA's chief engineer, conceived the project to set an example of planning for the entire United States. Indeed, it later also served as a model for the reconstruction of Europe and the economic and technological plans of developing countries. See James C. Scott, "High Modernist Social Engineering: The Case of the Tennessee Valley Authority," in Lloyd I. Rudolph and John Kurt Jacobsen, eds., Experiencing the State (Oxford, 2006), 3-52. On the history of the TVA, see also Tim Culvahouse, ed., The Tennessee Valley Authority: Design and Persuasion (New York, 2007); Richard A. Colignon, Power Plays: Critical Events in the Institutionalization of the Tennessee Valley Authority (Albany, N.Y., 1997); Walter L. Creese, TVA's Public Planning: The Vision, the Reality (Knoxville, Tenn., 1990). ^18For the historiographical importance of utopias and future scenarios, see David C. Engerman, "Histories of the Future and the Futures of History," American Historical Review 117, no. 5 (December 2012): 1402-1410. ^19See George Basalla, "Some Persistent Energy Myths," in George H. Daniels and Mark H. Rose, eds., Energy and Transport: Historical Perspectives on Policy Issues (Beverly Hills, Calif., 1982), 27-38, here 29-30. ^20On the eighteenth-century origins of cornucopian ideas and the "overlapping myths of abundance and exploitation," see Fredrik Albritton Jonsson, "The Origins of Cornucopianism: A Preliminary Genealogy," Critical Historical Studies 1, no. 1 (2014): 151-168. ^21See David E. Nye, American Technological Sublime (Cambridge, Mass., 1994). ^22For Mitchell's work on the impact of the shift from coal to oil, see Timothy Mitchell, "Hydrocarbon Utopia," in Michael D. Gordin, Helen Tilley, and Gyan Prakash, eds., Utopia/Dystopia: Conditions of Historical Possibility (Princeton, N.J., 2010), 117-147; Mitchell, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil (London, 2011). The promise of conflict-free water engineering works was chimerical, to be sure; on the political dimension and the conflict potential of large hydroengineering projects, see, for instance, Patrick McCully, Silenced Rivers: The Ecology and Politics of Large Dams, 2nd ed. (London, 2001); Eva Jakobsson, "Industrialization of Rivers: A Water System Approach to Hydropower Development," Knowledge, Technology, and Policy 14, no. 4 (2002): 41-56. ^23Manu Goswami, "Imaginary Futures and Colonial Internationalisms," American Historical Review 117, no. 5 (December 2012): 1461-1485, here 1485. ^24Cf. David Edgerton, The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900 (Oxford, 2007). ^25In his descriptions of the Mediterranean, Sorgel repeatedly referred to Otto Jessen, Die Strasse von Gibraltar (Berlin, 1927). ^26Herman Sorgel, Atlantropa: Wesenszuge eines Projekts (Stuttgart, 1948), 15. The ideas and plans that Sorgel laid out in detail in his first book on Atlantropa in 1932 would remain largely unchanged over the next few decades. See Sorgel, Mittelmeer-Senkung, Sahara-Bewasserung (Panropa-Projekt) (Leipzig, 1929); Sorgel, Atlantropa; Sorgel, Die drei grossen "A": Grossdeutschland und italienisches Imperium, die Pfeiler Atlantropas (Munich, 1938); Sorgel, Atlantropa: Wesenszuge. Until 1930, Sorgel still referred to his project as "Panropa," a name he eventually changed to avoid confusion with the Pan-European Union under Count Richard Nikolaus von Coudenhove-Kalergi. ^27Sorgel, Atlantropa, 24, 126; see also Gall, "Atlantropa." ^28See Lagendijk, Electrifying Europe, 44-67. ^29See ibid., chap. 3; Peo Hansen and Stefan Jonsson, Eurafrica: The Untold History of European Integration and Colonialism (London, 2014). On early ideas of European integration, see Carl H. Pegg, Evolution of the European Idea, 1914-1932 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1983); on the importance of the issues of efficiency (or the "load factor") and reliability (achieved through an energy mix) in the development of electricity grids, see Thomas P. Hughes, Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society, 1880-1930 (Baltimore, 1983), 218-221. ^30For a few (relatively) recent histories of the New Deal, see Colin Gordon, New Deals: Business, Labor, and Politics in America, 1920-1935 (Cambridge, 1994); William E. Leuchtenburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932-1940 (1963; repr., New York, 2009); Ira Katznelson, Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time (New York, 2013). ^31Although the Pan American Union--the predecessor of the modern-day Organization of American States (OAS)--was far removed from Sorgel's ideal of an all-powerful centralized association, he still viewed it as a model for his political plans in Europe. See "Die Geschichte Atlantropas," Atlantropa-Mitteilungen 14 (1948), n.p., ADM NL 92/140. ^32H. G. Wells, The Outline of History: Being a Plain History of Life and Mankind (New York, 1920), 1091, emphasis in the original. ^33Wells mentioned an improved Pan American Union and spent a few lines describing his idea of "a United States of the Old World"; ibid. ^34Sorgel's second book-length publication on Atlantropa included the phrase "The Three Great 'A's'" in its title: Sorgel, Die drei grossen "A." ^35Wells, The Outline of History, 1094. Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi, the founder of the Pan-European Union and another source of inspiration for Sorgel, mirrored Wells's thoughts in his calls for a cosmopolitan and technological reorganization of politics. Similar to Sorgel, Coudenhove-Kalergi understood the First World War as an abominable civil war between Europeans, who had forgotten their common destiny and had misused the great technological advances of the industrial age. See Coudenhove-Kalergi, Revolution durch Technik (Vienna, 1932), in which the author talks about a "technological world revolution" that would eventually free and unite humankind. ^36In all likelihood, the comparison was chosen deliberately, as Germans had become fascinated with the large hydropower station at the falls, which began operations in 1895; see David Blackbourn, The Conquest of Nature: Water, Landscape, and the Making of Modern Germany (New York, 2006), 217-218. On the history of the Niagara Falls and their exploitation in the nineteenth century, see William Irwin, The New Niagara: Tourism, Technology, and the Landscape of Niagara Falls, 1776-1917 (University Park, Pa., 1996). ^37Sorgel, Atlantropa, 6. ^38Sorgel, "Die Welt ohne Kohle," Sonntags-Zeitung, October 4, 193, ADM NL 92/194. ^39Sorgel, Die drei grossen "A," 80. Sorgel did not disclose the source for these numbers. ^40See Madureira, "The Anxiety of Abundance." ^41Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism and other Writings, ed. and trans. Peter Baehr and Gordon C. Wells (New York, 2002), 120-121, emphasis in the original. ^42Johannes Walther, Das Gesetz der Wustenbildung in Gegenwart und Vorzeit, 2nd ed. (Leipzig, 1912), 99. ^43See Hermann Honnef, Windkraftwerke (Braunschweig, 1932). Toward the end of the Second World War, the Nazis experimented with wind power to supplement Germany's dwindling supply of energy. See Walther Schieber, "Energiequelle Windkraft," Deutsche Technik 10 (October 1942): 415-416; A. Fleischmann, "Neue Wege der Windkraftnutzung," ibid., 417-422. For a detailed study on wind energy in Germany, see Matthias Heymann, Die Geschichte der Windenergienutzung, 1890-1990 (Frankfurt a.M., 1995). ^44See Basalla, "Some Persistent Energy Myths," 31-32; David Blackbourn, The Culture and Politics of Energy in Germany: A Historical Perspective (Munich, 2013), 10-12. ^45"White coal" referred mainly to the place of origin of the energy, the snow-capped mountains of the Alps and Pyrenees, and was sometimes contrasted with "green coal" (rivers), "blue coal" (oceans), and "red coal" (volcanoes). As compared to the smoke and soot of black and brown coal, "white coal" also carried connotations of cleanliness. ^46Hughes, Networks of Power, 264; Wilhelm Fussl, Oskar von Miller, 1855-1934: Eine Biographie (Munich, 2005), 105-140; H. J. Habakkuk and M. Postan, eds., The Cambridge Economic History of Europe, vol. 6, pt. 2: The Industrial Revolutions and After: Incomes, Population and Technological Change (Cambridge, 1965), 509-518; Werner Batzing, Die Alpen: Geschichte und Zukunft einer europaischen Kulturlandschaft (Munich, 2003), 192. In a probably not entirely incidental historical connection, Oskar von Miller had cooperated with Herman Sorgel's father on the construction of the Walchensee Power Plant. On the history of the plant, see Fussl, Oskar von Miller, 164-195; Marc Landry, "Environmental Consequences of the Peace: The Great War, Dammed Lakes, and Hydraulic History in the Eastern Alps," Environmental History 20, no. 3 (2015): 422-448. ^47See Blackbourn, The Conquest of Nature, 217-220. In the first decade of the twentieth century, journals devoted to hydropower appeared in Germany under the titles Turbine and Weisse Kohle. ^48Cavailles, La houille blanche, 206-213; see also Lagendijk, Electrifying Europe, 51-57. ^49In the 1920s, Italy generated more than 90 percent of its electricity from hydropower. On the geography of hydropower in Europe, see Astrid Kander, "Energy Transitions in the Twentieth Century," in Astrid Kander, Paolo Malanima, and Paul Warde, eds., Power to the People: Energy in Europe over the Last Five Centuries (Princeton, N.J., 2013), 251-286. It was not just electricity itself that entrepreneurs and the wider public saw as a sign of progress, as David E. Nye has argued; the new technologies of the growing electric grids, such as large dams and giant penstocks, evoked admiration and enthusiasm (and sometimes already concern and trepidation) as well. Nye, Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology, 1880-1940 (Cambridge, Mass., 1990); Blackbourn, The Conquest of Nature, chap. 4. ^50On the history of air pollution in the U.S. and Germany, see Frank Uekotter, The Age of Smoke: Environmental Policy in Germany and the United States, 1880-1970 (Pittsburgh, 2009); Uekotter, Von der Rauchplage zur okologischen Revolution: Eine Geschichte der Luftverschmutzung in Deutschland und den USA, 1880-1970 (Essen, 2003). On the history of air pollution in Britain, see B. W. Clapp, An Environmental History of Britain since the Industrial Revolution (London, 1994), chaps. 2-3. One of the most famous participants in the debate was the German chemist Clemens Winkler; see Winkler, Vortrage und Abhandlungen uber Abgase und Rauchschaden, ed. Otto Brunck (Berlin, 1913). ^51Samuel S. Wyer, Digest of the Transactions of First World Power Conference Held at London, England, June 30 to July 12, 1924 (London, 1925), 10. ^52For case studies of the social, political, and environmental effects of hydroengineering, see, for instance, Blackbourn, The Conquest of Nature; Scott, "High Modernist Social Engineering"; Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity (Berkeley, Calif., 2002); Mark Fiege, Irrigated Eden: The Making of an Agricultural Landscape in the American West (Seattle, Wash., 1999); Donald Worster, Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West (New York, 1985). ^53On the history of hydropower development in Bavaria after the First World War, see Landry, "Environmental Consequences of the Peace." ^54The German fears materialized in 1923, after Germany defaulted on its reparation payments in the aftermath of World War I. For more information on the occupation of the Ruhr area, see Conan Fischer, The Ruhr Crisis, 1923-1924 (Oxford, 2003); Gerd Krumeich and Joachim Schroder, Der Schatten des Weltkriegs: Die Ruhrbesetzung, 1923 (Essen, 2004). ^55Heinrich Wilhelm Voegtle, Die Wasserkraftnutzung und die Bedeutung der deutschen Wasserturbinen-Industrie (Heidenheim a.d. Brenz, 1927), 25. ^56Arthur Lichtenauer, Die geographische Verbreitung der Wasserkrafte in Mitteleuropa (Wurzburg, 1926), 51. ^57Herman Sorgel, "Das Panropa-Projekt als stadtebauliche Darstellungsstudie," Baumeister 29, no. 5 (1931): 216-220, here 216. ^58Sorgel, Atlantropa, 118-119. On the respective ideas and projects of Heineman, Schonholzer, and Oliven, see Lagendijk, Electrifying Europe, 70-86; on the importance of material structures and, in particular, infrastructural projects in the long and still-incomplete process of European integration, see Alexander Badenoch and Andreas Fickers, eds., Materializing Europe: Transnational Infrastructures and the Project of Europe (New York, 2010). ^59Michael Adas has argued that the profound crisis of Western civilization after the First World War was due to a perceived loss of moral superiority over non-Europeans that had become increasingly centered on technological advances. See Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance (Ithaca, N.Y., 1989), chap. 6. ^60Sorgel, Atlantropa, 78. ^61To support his claims in the 1930s, Sorgel referred to the controversial theories of Versteppung, or "desertification," by the German landscape architect Alwin Seifert; see Sorgel, "Blut und Boden," Deutsche Freiheit, August 1937, ADM NL 92/195. For Seifert's most famous article on the topic, see Alwin Seifert, "Die Versteppung Deutschlands," Deutsche Technik 4 (1936): 423-427, 490-492. For more information on Seifert and his role in the construction of the German Autobahn, see Thomas Zeller, "'Ganz Deutschland sein Garten': Alwin Seifert und die Landschaft des Nationalsozialismus," in Joachim Radkau and Frank Uekotter, eds., Naturschutz und Nationalsozialismus (Frankfurt a.M., 2003), 273-308; Zeller, "Molding the Landscape of Nazi Environmentalism: Alwin Seifert and the Third Reich," in Franz-Josef Bruggemeier, Mark Cioc, and Thomas Zeller, eds., How Green Were the Nazis? Nature, Environment, and Nation in the Third Reich (Athens, Ohio, 2005), 147-170; Zeller, Driving Germany: The Landscape of the German Autobahn, 1930-1970 (New York, 2007). ^62On the rise of "Lebensraum" as a central category of German imperial visions, see Woodruff D. Smith, The Ideological Origins of Nazi Imperialism (New York, 1986), 83-111, 174-185, 224-230. ^63"Die Geschichte Atlantropas," Atlantropa-Mitteilungen 14 (1948), n.p., ADM NL 92/140. ^64Siegwart to Munchener Neueste Nachrichten, June 8, 1929; Siegwart to Sorgel, March 14, 1930, both ADM NL 92/232. ^65The entire exchange of letters between Siegwart and Sorgel can be found in ADM NL 92/86 and NL 92/232. ^66Sorgel to Paolo Vinassa de Regny, October 26, 1931, ADM NL 92/32. ^67Herman Sorgel and Bruno Siegwart, "Erschliessung Afrikas durch Binnenmeere: Saharabewasserung durch Mittelmeersenkung," Beilage zum Baumeister 3 (1935): 37-39. ^68Ibid., 37-38. ^69Siegwart to Sorgel, November 10, 1933, ADM NL 92/231. ^70Sorgel and Siegwart, "Erschliessung Afrikas durch Binnenmeere," 39. ^71See James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, Conn., 1998). ^72Sorgel, Atlantropa, 139. ^73Sorgel, "Nachtrag zum Congo-Projekt" (manuscript), n.d., ADM NL 92 /231. ^74Siegwart to Sorgel, July 15, 1934, ibid. ^75See, for example, Theobald Fischer, Studien uber das Klima der Mittelmeerlander (Gotha, 1879); Joseph Partsch, "Uber den Nachweis einer Klimaanderung der Mittelmeerlander in geschichtlicher Zeit," in Verhandlungen des VIII. deutschen Geographentages (Berlin, 1889), 116-125; Hermann Leiter, Die Frage der Klimaanderung wahrend geschichtlicher Zeit in Nordafrika (Vienna, 1909); Walther, Das Gesetz der Wustenbildung in Gegenwart und Vorzeit. The debate was continued into the 1920s by the controversial American geographer Ellsworth Huntington; see Huntington, The Pulse of Asia: A Journey in Central Asia Illustrating the Geographical Basis of History (Boston, 1907); Huntington, Palestine and Its Transformation (Boston, 1911); Huntington, Civilization and Climate, 3rd ed. (New Haven, Conn., 1924). ^76E. P. Stebbing, "The Encroaching Sahara: The Threat to the West African Colonies," Geographical Journal 85, no. 6 (1935): 506-519, here 510; for contemporary discussion of this lecture, see Percy Cox, G. Hemmant, F. M. Oliphant, R. S. Troup, Arthur Hill, and E. P. Stebbing, "The Encroaching Sahara: The Threat to the West African Colonies: Discussion," ibid., 519-524. ^77See William Malcolm Hailey, An African Survey: A Study of Problems Arising in Africa South of the Sahara (London, 1938). ^78E. Barton Worthington, The Ecological Century: A Personal Appraisal (Oxford, 1983), 36-37. ^79"Die Sahara ein Blumengarten?," 8 Uhr-Blatt, July 2, 1935, ADM NL 92/193. ^80Sorgel and Siegwart, "Erschliessung Afrikas durch Binnenmeere," 38. ^81Sorgel, "Kongo und Afrikawerke" (handwritten note), n.d., ADM NL 92/132. ^82On the image of "the Granary of Rome" and its use in French colonial discourses, see Diana K. Davis, Resurrecting the Granary of Rome: Environmental History and French Colonial Expansion in North Africa (Athens, Ohio, 2007). ^83On Roudaire's project, see Rene Letolle and Hocine Bendjoudi, Histoires d'une mer au Sahara: Utopies et politiques (Paris, 1997); Jean-Louis Marcot, Une mer au Sahara: Mirages de la colonisation, Algerie et Tunisie, 1869-1887 (Paris, 2003); Michael J. Heffernan, "Bringing the Desert to Bloom: French Ambitions in the Sahara Desert during the Late Nineteenth Century--The Strange Case of 'la mer interieure,'" in Denis Cosgrove and Geoff Petts, eds., Water, Engineering, and Landscape: Water Control and Landscape Transformation in the Modern Period (London, 1990), 94-114. ^84See E. H. L. Schwarz, The Kalahari, or Thirstland Redemption (Cape Town, 1920). Sorgel knew about this project, but doubted its viability. He mentioned reconnaissance flights that had allegedly demonstrated the plans to be unfeasible. He did not go into any detail as to where that information was from, nor which aspects of the project this assessment targeted, but it is probable that he was citing a geological, rather than a meteorological or climatological, critique; see Sorgel, "Die Bewasserung der Kalahari-Wuste" (handwritten note), n.d., ADM NL 92/86. ^85Ferdinand de Lesseps, the builder of the Suez Canal, reported on this phenomenon around the manmade Bitter Lakes in Egypt. See de Lesseps, "Communication sur les lacs amers de l'isthme de Suez," Comptes rendus hebdomadaires des seances de l'Academie des Sciences 78 (1874): 1740-1748; see also Letolle and Bendjoudi, Histoires d'une mer au Sahara, 28. ^86In 1940, the illustrious Hungarian Sahara researcher, motorist, Nazi spy, and real "English Patient" Count Laszlo Almasy came out in support of Sorgel's plans to create an inland sea in northern Africa. Like Sorgel himself, he was convinced that the introduction of a body of water would increase precipitation and raise the groundwater table under the Sahara. This transformation of the Sahara, Almasy added, was "one of the enormous tasks that await the economic new order of human ingenuity and enthusiasm [Schaffensfreude] in the coming years." See "Ein Kraftwerk in der Wuste: Unterredung mit dem Wustenforscher Graf L. E. von Almasy," Deutsche Bergwerkszeitung 275 (November 23, 1940), ADM NL 92/196. ^87F. Gessert, "Wusten und Pole," Die Umschau 46 (1925): 907-908, here 907. ^88For the history of weather and climate engineering with a focus on the second half of the twentieth century, see James Rodger Fleming, Fixing the Sky: The Checkered History of Weather and Climate Control (New York, 2010). ^89August Wendler, Das Problem der technischen Wetterbeeinflussung (Hamburg, 1927), 8. Around the same time, Robert DeCourcy Ward, the first U.S. professor in climatology, was more careful about the prospects of weather and climate engineering, arguing against any hope for modifications beyond the local scale; see Ward, "How Far Can Man Control His Climate?," Scientific Monthly 30, no. 1 (1930): 5-18, here 18. ^90The book, a confused mix of proto-environmental, anti-Bolshevik, antisemitic, anti-industrial, and eugenic ideas, saw Europe threatened by desertification from the east. This change, Sokolowski seemed to suggest, was both a cultural and an environmental process. What he was trying to argue in detail remains obscured by his inscrutable prose, but his pessimism was pervasive throughout the book. Paul von Sokolowski, Die Versandung Europas: ... eine andere, grosse russische Gefahr (Berlin, 1929). ^91Sorgel, Atlantropa, 84. The German original reads: "Wenn die Versandungsgefahr Europas durch Russland, fur sich allein analysiert, auch uberschatzt wird--wie viele ahnliche Sonderprobleme im einzelnen betrachtet--, so ist sie doch im synthetischen Zusammenhang des ganzen Weltgeschehens bedeutungsvoll und spielt sicher in der kommenden Organisation Europas eine nicht zu ubersehende Rolle." ^92It may have been criticism that prompted Sorgel to write about climate change, and he probably employed climatic arguments for rhetorical reasons at first. By the early 1930s, however, the issue of climatic changes appears to have become a central concern for him. On the tendency of macro-engineering advocates to make far-reaching claims about the alleged beneficial effects of their schemes, see Eugene S. Ferguson, "Historical Perspectives on Macro-Engineering Projects," in Frank P. Davidson, L. J. Giacoletto, and Robert Salkeld, eds., Macro-Engineering and the Infrastructure of Tomorrow (Boulder, Colo., 1978), 7-18. ^93Sorgel, Mittelmeer-Senkung, Sahara-Bewasserung, 32. ^94Sorgel, Atlantropa, 66. ^95Ibid., 67. This idea was strikingly similar to the 1912 plans of a New York engineer to block the cold Labrador current from the north by a manmade jetty jutting out from the eastern coast of Newfoundland; see Carroll Livingston Riker, Power and Control of the Gulf Stream: How It Regulates the Climates, Heat and Light of the World (Brooklyn, N.Y., 1912). ^96Sorgel, "Klimaverbesserung und Atlantropa," Rathenower Zeitung, June 28, 1933, ADM NL 92/193. It is not clear what drove Sorgel to make the claim about the cooling of Europe. From 1918 to 1933, only the winter of 1929 had been a particularly cold one in Central Europe. There was also no discernible general trend toward colder average temperatures in Germany or Central Europe during that period (there was actually an overall warming trend in the period 1891-1990). See Frank Sirocko, Heiko Brunck, and Stephan Pfahl, "Solar Influence on Winter Severity in Central Europe," Geophysical Research Letters 39, no. 16 (2012), http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/ doi/10.1029/2012GL052412/pdf; Christian-D. Schonwiese and Jorg Rapp, Climate Trend Atlas of Europe Based on Observations, 1891-1990 (Dordrecht, 1997), 30-32. ^97Sorgel, Die drei grossen "A," 23-26. ^98Sorgel, Atlantropa, 34. ^99Ibid., 70. ^100Herman Sorgel, "Neugestaltung der Erdoberflache durch den Ingenieur," in Die Welt im Fortschritt: Gemeinverstandliche Bucher des Wissens und Forschens der Gegenwart (Berlin, 1935), 15-57, here 20-21. ^101Handwritten and untitled note by Sorgel, July 17, 1930, ADM NL 92 /231. ^102Sorgel, Atlantropa, 33, 68. ^103Sorgel, Die drei grossen "A," 41. ^104Sorgel, "Das Panropa-Projekt als stadtebauliche Darstellungsstudie," 218; the same phrasing appears in Sorgel, Atlantropa, 8. ^105See, for instance, Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men, 380-402. ^106Oswald Spengler, Der Untergang des Abendlandes: Umrisse einer Morphologie der Weltgeschichte (Munich, 1931); on Spengler's immediate and enduring influence, see John Farrenkopf, Prophet of Decline: Spengler on World History and Politics (Baton Rouge, La., 2001); Manfred Gangl, Gilbert Merlio, and Markus Ophalders, eds., Spengler--Ein Denker der Zeitenwende (Frankfurt a.M., 2009); Samir Osmancevic, Oswald Spengler und das Ende der Geschichte (Vienna, 2007). ^107See Voigt, Atlantropa, 21. ^108Sorgel, Die drei grossen "A," 91. ^109Sorgel, Atlantropa, 104. On the marked tendency for "either/or" scenarios, or the "discrete charm of radical dichotomy," in the Weimar Republic, see Graf, Die Zukunft der Weimarer Republik, 161-170. ^110Sorgel's reading was, in fact, quite close to Jeffrey Herf's interpretation of Spengler as a technology enthusiast; see Herf, Reactionary Modernism, chap. 3. ^111Oswald Spengler, Der Mensch und die Technik (Paderborn, 2007), 39. ^112Ibid., 75. ^113Ibid. ^114Spengler quote from ibid., 82. ^115Sorgel, Atlantropa, 70-71. On the importance of the concept of energy in European thought in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, see Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (Berkeley, Calif., 1992). ^116This is most conspicuous in Spengler's 1919 essay on "Prussiandom and Socialism": Oswald Spengler, Preussentum und Sozialismus (Munich, 1921). ^117As part of the wide range of different strands of civilizational critique that Thomas Rohkramer has catalogued, Sorgel stood on one of the extreme ends of the spectrum. Rather than trying to subordinate technology to political exigencies, he pleaded against any and all restrictions of the reach and autonomy of technology, and expected social and political miracles from a full and unfettered "technological penetration" of European society. Sorgel's approach to technology thus corresponds most closely to Rohkramer's third group among the German civilizational critics, whom he describes as trying to solve any technological problems by the fine-tuning and full expression of technology itself. See Rohkramer, Eine andere Moderne?, 32-34. ^118See Stefan Willeke, Die Technokratiebewegung in Nordamerika und Deutschland zwischen den Weltkriegen (Frankfurt a.M., 1995); Charles Maier, "Zwischen Taylorismus und Technokratie: Gesellschaftspolitik im Zeichen industrieller Rationalitat in den zwanziger Jahren in Europa," in Michael Sturmer, ed., Die Weimarer Republik: Belagerte Civitas (Konigstein, 1980), 188-213. ^119Wayne W. Parrish, Technokratie--Die neue Heilslehre (Munich, 1933); original English version An Outline of Technocracy (New York, 1933). ^120Some of these ideas are laid out in Howard Scott, Introduction to Technocracy (1933; repr., New York, 1940). For more on the American technocratic movement, see William E. Akin, Technocracy and the American Dream: The Technocrat Movement, 1900-1941 (Berkeley, Calif., 1977). ^121Parrish, Technokratie, 38. ^122On the centrality of technocratic planning in the Weimar Republic, see Rohkramer, "Antimodernism, Reactionary Modernism and National Socialism." ^123See, for instance, H. Bode, Robert Potonie, and Karl Haushofer, "Was sagt die Wissenschaft zum Projekt der Mittelmeersenkung?," Reclams Universum 46, no. 12 (1929): 258. On this point, see also Gall, Das Atlantropa-Projekt, 14, 54. ^124Richard Hennig, "Sorgels Plan eines Binnenschiffahrtsweges durch die Sahara," Technik und Wirtschaft 29 (1936): 180-182, quote from 181-182. ^125Cited in Alfred Opitz, "Atlantropa," Kultur & Technik 3, no. 3 (1979): 33-36. Like Sorgel, Eugen Diesel had grown up in the progressive and bohemian district of Schwabing in fin-de-siecle Munich. Rather than follow the laid-out career path of an engineer--as his father had hoped--Diesel decided to to make his living as an author. He never strayed far from his family background, however, focusing on the history of technology and its deep societal impact. See Donald E. Thomas Jr., "Diesel, Father and Son: Social Philosophies of Technology," Technology and Culture 19, no. 3 (1978): 376-393. ^126Italian Consulate to Sorgel, September 27, 1929, ADM NL 92/446. ^127Sorgel, Die drei grossen "A," i, 30. ^128Gall, Das Atlantropa-Projekt, 81-86. On the role of the Nazi Office for Spatial Planning in the colonial plans for the occupied areas in the East during the Second World War, see Elke Paul-Weber, "Die Reichsstelle fur Raumordnung und die Ostplanung," in Mechtild Rossler and Sabine Schleiermacher, eds., Der "Generalplan Ost": Hauptlinien der nationalsozialistischen Planungs- und Vernichtungspolitik (Berlin, 1993), 148-153. ^129Sorgel to Koster (Department Head of the Reichsstelle fur Raumordnung), n.d., ADM NL 92/49. ^130See Bernhard Stier, Staat und Strom: Die politische Steuerung des Elektrizitatssystems in Deutschland, 1890-1950 (Ubstadt-Weiher, 1999), 470-489. ^131On the similarities of scale between Sorgel's ideas and Nazi visions, see Erik van der Vleuten and Arne Kaijser, "Networking Europe," History and Technology 21, no. 1 (2005): 21-48, here 34-35; on the Nazi plans for environmental transformation in the occupied areas in the East, see Gert Groning and Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn, Der Drang nach Osten: Zur Entwicklung der Landespflege im Nationalsozialismus und wahrend des Zweiten Weltkrieges in den "eingegliederten Ostgebieten" (Munich, 1987); Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn, "Violence as the Basis of National Socialist Landscape Planning in the 'Annexed Eastern Areas,'" in Bruggemeier, Cioc, and Zeller, How Green Were the Nazis?, 243-256; Mechtild Rossler and Sabine Schleiermacher, eds., Der "Generalplan Ost" : Hauptlinien der nationalsozialistischen Planungs- und Vernichtungspolitik (Berlin, 1993). ^132Sorgel, "Abgrenzungsmoglichkeit und Schutz gegen Asien" (handwritten note), n.d., ADM NL 92/86; Sorgel, "Ost oder Sud" (manuscript), Fall 1941, ADM NL 92/34. On the ideological origins of the Nazis' "drive toward the East," see Wolfgang Wippermann, Der "deutsche Drang nach Osten": Ideologie und Wirklichkeit eines politischen Schlagwortes (Darmstadt, 1981); Wippermann, Die Deutschen und der Osten: Feindbild und Traumland (Darmstadt, 2007); Gregor Thum, "Ex oriente lux--ex oriente furor: Einfuhrung," in Thum, ed., Traumland Osten: Deutsche Bilder vom ostlichen Europa im 20. Jahrhundert (Gottingen, 2006), 7-15; Gerd Koenen, "Der deutsche Russland-Komplex: Zur Ambivalenz deutscher Ostorientierung in der Weltkriegsphase," ibid., 16-46; Henry Cord Meyer, Drang nach Osten: Fortunes of a Slogan-Concept in German-Slavic Relations, 1849-1990 (Bern, 1996). ^133Sorgel, Die drei grossen "A," 29-30, 34-37; Sorgel, "Ost oder Sud," ADM NL 92/34. ^134Sorgel, "Nord-Sud" (handwritten note), n.d., ADM NL 92/86. ^135Sorgel, 'Weiss oder Farbig?," Deutsche Freiheit 29 (October 1937), ADM NL 92/195. ^136Sorgel, "Panropa-Projekt als stadtebauliche Darstellungsstudie," 219. For German perceptions of China and its population, see Mechthild Leutner, "Deutsche Vorstellungen uber China und Chinesen und uber die Rolle der Deutschen in China 1890-1945," in Heng-yu Kuo, ed., Von der Kolonialpolitik zur Kooperation: Studien zur Geschichte der deutsch-chinesischen Beziehungen (Munich, 1986), 401-443. ^137Cf. Sokolowski, Die Versandung Europas. ^138Sorgel, "Ursymbole der Kulturkreise," ADM NL 92/34; cf. Sorgel, "Fragenbeantwortung" (typescript), February 12, 1926, ADM NL 92/110. ^139See Gall, Das Atlantropa-Projekt, 41-42. ^140"Die Geschichte Atlantropas," Atlantropa-Mitteilungen 22 (1949), n.p., ADM NL 92/140. ^141Sorgel, "Vor dem Richterstuhl der Zeit," n.d., ADM NL 92/34. ^142Sorgel, "Es schwinden, es fallen die leidenden Menschen blindlings von einer Stunde zur anderen" (manuscript), n.d. (ca. 1946-1949), ADM NL 92/31. ^143Sorgel, "Idee eines Zwolferrates zur Vorbereitung von Atlantropa" (handwritten note), n.d. (ca. 1946-1949), ADM NL 92/52. ^144In 1938, Zischka had already published a book on "the eternal hunger and the satiation of the 2,000 million human beings of our earth"; Anton Zischka, Brot fur zwei Milliarden Menschen (Leipzig, 1938), 7. ^145Ibid., 304-305. ^146Anton Zischka, Afrika, Europas Gemeinschaftsaufgabe Nr. 1 (Oldenburg, 1951), 60-70. The book was published by the Stalling publishing house, which had been closely allied with the German army in the 1920s and during the Third Reich, and retained a pronounced right-wing slant after the war. ^147Ibid., 109. ^148See Klaus Gestwa, Die Stalinschen Grossbauten des Kommunismus: Sowjetische Technik- und Umweltgeschichte, 1948-1967 (Munich, 2010). ^149See "Projekt Dawidow: Ums Leben kommen," Der Spiegel, May 11, 1950. ^150Sorgel, "Russland 'baut' ein Meer," Deutsche Presse Korrespondenz 24 (1950): 2-3, ADM NL 92/6. Conversely, the relevant authorities in the Soviet Union were apparently aware of Sorgel's project as well, and attempted to win him over to their cause. This is at least what a newspaper reported in 1951, although Sorgel himself may have planted the information in order to increase the pressure on the West German government and the Allied Powers to support Atlantropa. See Bundesarchiv Koblenz (BArch) B 136/6063: "Angebote aus der UdSSR fur Soergel," Die Neue Zeitung: Die Amerikanische Zeitung in Deutschland, April 12, 1951. ^151Herman Sorgel, Idee und Macht: Ein Sang von Atlantropa. Zum 25-jahrigen Bestehen Atlantropas (Oberstdorf, 1950). ^152On the statistics of global hydropower capacity, see John S. Gulliver and Roger E. A. Arndt, "Hydropower, History and Technology of," in Cutler J. Cleveland, ed., Encyclopedia of Energy (New York, 2004), 304, fig. 3. ^153See John Krige, "Techno-Utopian Dreams, Techno-Political Realities: The Education of Desire for the Peaceful Atom," in Gordin, Tilley, and Prakash, Utopia/Dystopia, 151-175. ^154Sorgel, "Die Welt ohne Kohle," Sonntags-Zeitung, October 4, 1936, ADM NL 92/194; Sorgel, "Die Welt ohne Kohle: Atlantropa und die kunftige Energiewirtschaft," Natur und Technik 19 (1948): 283-290, ADM NL 92/73. ^155See Lagendijk, Electrifying Europe, chap. 5. ^156Sorgel, "Es schwinden, es fallen die leidenden Menschen," ADM NL 92/31. ^157For Sorgel's source of information on Arrhenius's theories, see W. Harnisch, "Das Ende der Kohle," Deutsche Bergwerks-Zeitung, March 25, 1941, ADM NL 92/196; on Arrhenius and his findings on the greenhouse effect in the late nineteenth century, see Elisabeth T. Crawford, Arrhenius: From Ionic Theory to the Greenhouse Effect (Canton, Mass., 1996). ^158Sorgel, "Austrocknung in Afrika" and "Literatur uber Afrika" (handwritten notes), n.d., ADM NL 92/86. ^159"Kann der Mensch das Klima lenken?," Westdeutscher Beobachter, May 13, 1942, ADM NL 92/196. ^160On this point, see Fleming, Fixing the Sky. ^161"Atlantropa verandert die Geographie Europa-Afrikas," Atlantropa-Mitteilungen 25 (1949), n.p., ADM NL 92/140. ^162Theens would later act as the curator of the Faust Museum in Knittlingen, Germany. See Karl Hochwald, "Zehn Jahre Faust-Gedenkstatte in Knittlingen," in Henri Clemens Birven, Dietmar Theens, and Karl Weisert, eds., Faust im zwanzigsten Jahrhundert: Festschrift fur Karl Theens zum sechzigsten Geburtstag (Knittlingen, 1964), 47-49. ^163Anton Metternich, Die Wuste droht: Die gefahrdete Nahrungsgrundlage der menschlichen Gesellschaft (Bremen, 1947). ^164Sorgel, "Der Atlantropa-Plan mit besonderer Berucksichtigung von Wasser und Boden" (manuscript), n.d., ADM NL 92/52. ^165Theens to Sorgel, January 2, 1948, ADM NL 92/65. ^166Karl Theens, Der Sorgel-Plan: Afrika + Europa = Atlantropa (Bielefeld, 1949), 42. ^167The connection between the two projects was, in fact, drawn by the German print media. See Ulrich Baron, "Vision vom Strom aus der Wuste hat Vorlaufer," Welt, July 17, 2009, sec. Feuilleton; Holger Liebs, "Strom aus der Wuste: Weisse Elefanten fur den Sonnenkonig," Suddeutsche, May 2010, sec. Wirtschaft. For a critical discussion of the comparison, see Alexander Gall, "Mediterrane Stromvisionen: Von Atlantropa zu DESERTEC?," in Uwe Fraunholz and Anke Woschech, eds., Technology Fiction: Technische Visionen und Utopien in der Hochmoderne (Bielefeld, 2012), 165-191. ^168This article is not meant as a direct intervention in the debates about global warming and geoengineering today, but it does strive to contextualize current scientific findings and popular anxieties. I agree with Paul Sabin, who in a recent article wrote, "History does not provide a roadmap for the future, but rather stories, parables, and analogies that help inspire and guide our thinking." Sabin, "'The Ultimate Environmental Dilemma': Making a Place for Historians in the Climate Change and Energy Debates," Environmental History 15, no. 1 (2010): 76-93, here 89. ^169For a recent overview of geoengineering schemes, see Naomi E. Vaughan and Timothy M. Lenton, "A Review of Climate Geoengineering Proposals," Climatic Change 109, no. 3-4 (2011): 745-790; for a historical look at geoengineering, see James Rodger Fleming, "The Pathological History of Weather and Climate Modification: Three Cycles of Promise and Hype," Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 37, no. 1 (2006): 3-25. (c) The Author(s) 2016. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical Association. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail journals.permissions@oup.com. (c) The Author(s) 2016. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical Association. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail journals.permissions@oup.com. 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