Eden Non-profit fruit growing settlement

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Old cider factory
Inscription on the cooperative house: The three trees stand for life reform, land reform, social reform.

The Eden Gemeinnützige Obstbau-Siedlung eG, north of Berlin in Oranienburg , was founded on May 28, 1893 by 18 Berlin vegetarians as the first vegetarian settlement in Germany (and before Monte Verità in Switzerland) under the name Vegetarian Fruit Growing Colony Eden eGmbH founded. It was located in a size of 125 hectares near the last S-Bahn station in Berlin and was supposed to deliver vegetarian products to Berlin's large kitchens. From 1920 under the name of Obstbau-Siedelung Eden eGmbH , the cooperative has been known as Eden Gemeinnützige Obstbau-Siedlung eG since 1990 . The name of the settlement, also known as the "Garden of Eden", was chosen after the name for the paradise of Eden .

history

On May 28, 1893, "about 18 [...] like-minded life reformers" decided at a meeting in the Berlin dining house Ceres , citing Eduard Baltzer and under the commercial management of Bruno Wilhelmi (1865–1909) to found the allotment garden project for the non-profit vegetarian community Fruit growing colony of Eden . The merchant and life reformer Wilhelmi was the driving force behind the implementation of the vegetarian way of life, joint land ownership (social reform) and big city criticism in a settlement project in 1893 . In the first expansion stage of the project, 80 gardens were created, which were handed over to the residents on a long lease and planted with fruit trees and berry bushes in accordance with the statutes. The homesteads and residential buildings were built on the land . By 1900 there were 15,000 fruit trees, 50,000 berry bushes, 3000 hazelnut bushes, 200,000 strawberry plants and 20,000 rhubarb bushes in the settlement. The cooperative includes businesses and social institutions, such as the Eden printing and bookbindery, its own school and the cooperative processing of the fruit. From 1899 several buildings are on an invention by Gustav Lilienthal with cement hollow bricks next settlement houses an inn and rest home and a shared accommodation for "New Edener" built.

Due to financial failures, Wilhelmi had to resign as early as 1895. Now non-vegetarians were also allowed to participate and the social reform via the cooperative form by Hermann Krecke († 1904) was brought to the fore. Nevertheless, in some cases self-management continued. The marketing of all-natural fruit products such as Edener jams , fruit and vegetable juices, Edener Kraftnahrung as a meat substitute through the health food stores was successful . Suggestions also came from ideas that circulated in Friedrichshagen's circle of poets . A decisive sponsor was the sociologist and cooperative socialist Franz Oppenheimer , who also supported the Bärenklau settlement project near Velten . One of the board members of the cooperative was Paul Schirrmeister , one of the leading figures in life reform. The free economist Silvio Gesell lived here for a while.

But the settlement opened not only wider the life reform movement , so in 1897 the running race by Carl Mann , also easier Reform clothes (sandals, women clothes without many petticoats, corset , parasol, big hats or Muff ), and alcohol and tobacco freedom, but also since the time of the First World War, folk and anti-Semitic tendencies. Therefore, in 1916 it was declared that a “German-Völkisch spirit” was a prerequisite for “settling” in the sense of the settlement, to which only “German Aryanism” enabled. That is why the settlement remained unmolested by the Nazi state. In 1938, 1,300 people lived there, 395 of them settlers; In 1939 "almost 1000 people" still lived in the fruit growing colony.

Also in the GDR , the settlement was as Horticulture Production Association continue, since 1950 there have been in Bad Soden am Taunus subsidiary Eden goods to the West sales, which significantly contributed to the foreign exchange earnings for economic survival and the Federal Republic of Germany customers in agricultural products of the brand Eden supplied . In 1972 the fruit processing was separated as a state-owned company and thus devalued for the income side. In 1990 a request was made to retransfer. In 2008 there were around 1500 people in Eden.

In 2017, the Eden artist duo bankleer , alias Karin Kasböck and Christoph Leitner, started the “re: form Eden eV” movement in order to dare to “update the life reform approaches of the Eden settlement”. As part of this Eden reform movement, a project called RE: EDEN followed in 2018 on the occasion of the 125th anniversary of the settlement , which invites you to “re-question the founding ideas of Eden”. According to the vision of the re: form association , the RE: EDEN project is “an attempt to give shape to the future in the present”. In addition to Edeners, a large number of “artists, architects, researchers, groups and people” as well as the broader public are currently dealing with a series of salons, a summer academy and a festival. Century.

Prominent Edeners

Relief on the cooperative house
relief
Former youth hostel
  • Adolf Damaschke (1865–1935), leader of the land reform movement, was a member of the cooperative from 1911 until his death in 1935.
  • Silvio Gesell (1862–1930), who lived in Eden from 1911 to World War I, returned here in 1927 and stayed until his death in 1930.
  • Wilhelm Groß (1883–1974), sculptor and preacher
  • Carl Gustav Hempel (1905–1997), philosopher, grew up here.
  • Karl Klindworth (1830–1916), composer, conductor, music teacher and piano virtuoso
  • Gustav Lilienthal (1849–1933), aviation pioneer and master builder, built settlement houses, but did not live in Eden.
  • Winifred Wagner (1897–1980), adopted daughter of Karl Klindworth, daughter-in-law of Richard Wagner

literature

  • Judith Baumgartner: Food reform - response to industrialization and food change. Food reform as part of the life reform movement using the example of the Eden settlement and company since 1893 . Diss. Munich, 1992. Lang, Frankfurt et al. 1992; ISBN 3-631-45240-3
  • Christian Böttger: On life in the cooperative settlements "Eden" and "Falkenberg" from the beginning of their existence until 1933: a comparative folklore study of the way of life and culture of residents of two settlements in the Berlin area . Diss. Humboldt University Berlin, 1993; DNB 940907895 .
  • Ulrich Grober: Exit into the future: a trip to eco-settlements, energy workshops and think tanks . Links, Berlin 1998; ISBN 3-86153-159-3 .
  • K. Großmann (Ed.): 75 Years of Eden (1893–1968). The fruit growing settlement Oranienburg and the subsidiary Eden-Waren. Bad Soden am Taunus 1968.
  • Hermann Kaienburg: The dream of the Garden of Eden. The “Eden” horticultural estate in Oranienburg as an alternative economic and living community . In: Zeitschrift für Geschichtswwissenschaft 52, Issue 12, 2004, pp. 1077-1090
  • Ulrich Linse (ed.); Back, oh human, to mother earth. Rural municipalities in Germany. 1890–1933 , Munich 1983.
  • Werner Onken : The Eden-Oranienburg cooperative settlement - history and topicality of a land reform experiment . In: Model experiments with socially responsible soil and money . Fachverlage für Sozialökonomie, Lütjenburg, 1997; ISBN 3-87998-440-9 , (online as PDF)
  • Joachim Joe Scholz: If we have the youth, we have the future. The Eden / Oranienburg fruit-growing settlement as an alternative model of society and upbringing (1893–1926) (= educational and cultural-historical contributions for Berlin and Brandenburg, Volume 3). Weidler, Berlin 2002; ISBN 3-89693-217-9
  • Astrid Segert, Irene Zierke: In search of Eden. The life reforming cooperative Eden on the threshold of the 21st century (= Cottbus studies on the history of technology, work and the environment, 16). Waxmann, Münster, 2002; ISBN 3-8309-1015-0 .
  • Hanna Spiegel: The sculptor Wilhelm Groß in Eden: Facets from life and work from 1919 to 1974. Edition Pommern, Elmenhorst / Vorpommern 2016, ISBN 978-3-939680-33-8 .
  • The Garden of Eden in the Niederbarnim district. In: Calendar 1914 for the Niederbarnim district. Oranienburg 1914, pp. 90-92.

Similar communities

Reform housing estate Eden in Vienna

Without the involvement or involvement of the Oranienburger fruit growing settlement Eden, the building and settlement cooperative and reform settlement Eden was founded in Vienna in the summer of 1921 . The office of the Viennese architect Ernst Egli , in which Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky was also employed at the time , drew up the development plan, which was later only partially implemented.

The settlement was built in 1922/1923 in the 14th district on the slope of the Wolfersberg between Hüttelbergstraße, Edenstraße, Knödelhüttenstraße, Mittelstraße and Haspelmeistergasse. The area, in which 25 houses in Edenstrasse were initially planned as a self-sufficient settlement, had already been largely cleared after the First World War due to wild land grabbing and built without any infrastructural measures. Before construction began, the settlers had to lead the development work and, as candidates for a building site, had to work between 1,000 and 3,000 unpaid hours of work for the settler community. The City of Vienna leased the land under heritable building rights and granted or brokered cheap building loans and mortgages. The houses had front gardens and behind the house a maximum of 500 m² gardens for self-sufficiency.

The settlement itself was at no time a purely anarchist or land reform project, as the settlers, for lack of money, worked together with other associations and groups such as the theosophists , Baptists and free thinkers . The settlement itself still exists today, but hardly anything has been preserved from the buildings from that time, as the houses were converted or expanded. The two model houses planned by the architects have been preserved from the beginning of the settlement, as well as the children's home built by the Theosophists, which is now used as a private residence.

Heimland Colony

One colony that Eden had as a model was Heimland in Brandenburg, which was founded on October 18, 1908 as the Heimland settlement company. The driving force behind the project was Theodor Fritsch (1852–1933), who published his ideas as early as 1896 in his book “The City of the Future”.

Model settlement Freidorf

Starting in 1921, around 150 families from the Swiss cooperative movement on the outskirts of Basel lived in the model settlement of Freidorf near Basel in a village-based, cooperative settlement experiment beyond the competitive capitalist economy.

Steyerberg garden of life

The life Steyerberg is a Founded in 1986, Development Community in spots Steyerberg the district of Nienburg in Lower Saxony . It sees itself as a model and research project for a way of life in harmony with nature.

Ecovillage Sieben Linden

The ecovillage Sieben Linden is a socio-ecological model settlement and community in the Altmark municipality of Beetzendorf ( Saxony-Anhalt ) that has existed since 1997 . It sees itself as a model and research project for a future-oriented way of life in which work and leisure, economy and ecology, individual and community, cosmopolitan and village culture find a balance in small circles of life.

Tempelhof eco-settlement

The Ökosiedlung Tempelhof is an existing since 2010 community in Kreßberg in northern Baden-Württemberg . Twenty people from diverse societies and beliefs worked for three years on the vision of living together with an ecologically sustainable way of being, which has been implemented since 2011.

Web links

Commons : Eden Charitable Fruit Growing Settlement  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Eden non-profit fruit growing settlement eG: Bruno Wilhelmi 08.08.1865 - 27.04.1909 .
  2. ^ Karl Eduard Rothschuh : Naturopathic Movement, Reform Movement, Alternative Movement. Stuttgart 1983; Reprint Darmstadt 1986, pp. 114–116-
  3. ^ Gundolf Keil : Vegetarian. In: Medical historical messages. Journal for the history of science and specialist prose research. Volume 34, 2015 (2016), pp. 29–68, here: pp. 56–58.
  4. ↑ George L. Mosse : The Volkische Revolution. About the spiritual roots of National Socialism . Frankfurt / Main 1991, p. 123 f.
  5. ^ Robert Jütte : History of Alternative Medicine. From folk medicine to today's unconventional therapies. Beck, Munich 1996, ISBN 3-406-40495-2 , p. 160.
  6. ^ Gundolf Keil: Vegetarian. 2015 (2016), p. 58.
  7. ↑ Anja Sokolow: Paradise is in Brandenburg The Eisenbergers and the fruit growing settlement "Eden" - An Havel & Spree . In: Der Tagesspiegel: Potsdamer Latest News . October 14, 2008. Retrieved May 21, 2016.
  8. ↑ right eden, May 27 - September 23, 2018. bankleer - artist duo Kasböck / Leitner, accessed on September 27, 2018 .
  9. ↑ a b RE: EDEN. Retrieved September 27, 2018 .
  10. ^ RE: EDEN Manifesto. Retrieved September 27, 2018 .
  11. ^ Pedro Waloschek (editor): The architect Hans Waloschek : His life and his friends , Books on Demand; Edition: 1st, (February 17, 2009), ISBN 978-3-8370-8084-1
  12. ↑ settlement Eden aud Vienna History Wiki
  13. ↑ A noble anarchist Eden - About the anarchists and anti-militarists Alfred Saueracker / Alfred Parker
  14. ^ Ernst Egli in the architectural dictionary


Coordinates: 52 ° 45 '  N , 13 ° 12'  E