Lars Hopstock’s Idyll and Ideology: Hermann Mattern and the Landscape to Live In is a “heavy-lifter” historiographic study. Published by Jovis in 2024, the volume arrives as a carefully crafted and tactile artefact in Jagd style, with hunting-green viscose-flocked covers reminiscent of a mounted trophy. Indeed, Hopstock has ventured deeply into archival “woods”, emerging with meticulous evidence and nuanced narratives around Hermann Mattern (1902–1971), one of Germany’s most significant yet contentious landscape architects. His expansive research not only sets the bar incredibly high for any similar undertakings but vividly frames Mattern’s navigation between aesthetic idyll and loaded ideology.

On the occasion of the book presentation and review, we interviewed Lars Hopstock about the German specificities in garden and landscape design (see below).

The book’s significance lies not only in its scope but in its method. Hopstock moves beyond the myth of the solitary genius, and pays attention to the often-silenced female “counterparts”—Mattern’s wives Herta Hammerbacher and Beate zur Nedden, his daughter Merete Mattern—as well as dealing at length with famous colleagues, first of all the nursery owner Karl Foerster. Mattern is positioned within a broader intellectual and professional network, not as an isolated figure. Through this lens, the book reconstructs the entangled political climates, social relations, and disciplinary shifts that defined twentieth-century landscape architecture, architecture, and art in Germany and beyond.

Crucially, Hopstock interrogates the ideological substrata—or its absence—behind idyllic representations of landscape, which, if left unexamined, risks being reproduced uncritically through design and teaching. The book serves as a tool to observe ideas that today seem contemporary and progressive, yet reflect a long-standing ideological tradition we would not necessarily wish to subscribe to. Further, we observe the interchangeability of progressive and traditional-leaning designs in their expression.

By closely tracing Mattern’s biography, the book vividly portrays broader shifts from garden art towards landscape architecture as a distinct discipline, the formation of university curricula, and the overall professional evolution of landscape architecture across the twentieth century.

Hopstock’s unapologetically critical stance toward his archival sources and the literature prevents him from succumbing to “reductionist traps”—a rigour he also expects from other researchers. This approach distinguishes his work as a significant achievement in landscape architecture historiography. The book carefully examines the diverse discourses and influential voices that shaped twentieth-century German landscape architecture, closely tracking Mattern’s career through interwar, wartime, and post-war contexts. Consequently, Idyll and Ideology emerges as a nuanced and sombre account of one of Germany’s most prominent landscape architects, grounded firmly in archival evidence, free from both condemnation and glorification.

Moreover, embedding Mattern in the cultural and aesthetic climate prevailing during specific decades, influenced by personal relations, is not only humanising the figure, but also presenting a controversial array of relationships and sets of events that portray complex, nuanced events marked by contradiction and tension. One could easily get lost in the richness of trajectories, while Hopstock convincingly leads the path connecting the dots following Mattern’s career development. The whole book is simultaneously present in each chapter. It is not linear but interwoven. References to past or future are interchangeable and dense, reflecting Mattern’s reasoning. Layout and imagery strongly support and expand the textual narrative; many of the designs, ideas and articles of the time are carefully worked through. Hopstock portrays Mattern as an ambiguous character, difficult to pin down—connected on the one hand to liberal arts and currents, and to the Nazis’ Organisation Todt, on the other.

The 400-page desk study is beautifully designed and produced to high ecological standards, featuring lavish prints. It includes a Foreword by Marc Treib, a Preface, an Introduction with a literature overview, and a chapter contextualising twentieth-century garden art tendencies. The main body is divided into three parts: Early Influences, Continuities Across Systems, and The New Landscape Consciousness, followed by an Epilogue. It concludes with an extensive Appendix containing a Glossary, Index, and Bibliography—tools intended for historians and researchers. Idyll and Ideology covers far more than what is outlined below.

In the opening chapters, Hopstock explores Mattern’s formative years and the fruitful collaboration with his love, Herta Hammerbacher and a close colleague, Foerster. The scenic Lenné-Meyer school template, characterised by parks designed exclusively for visual pleasure and promenading, began evolving stylistically toward the end of the 19th century. Garden culture increasingly sought contemporary expression free from historicism and naturalistic imitations. Influenced by the Lebensreform movement and disseminated through journals such as Gartenkunst, new concepts emerged, favouring architectonic, and also scientifically informed approaches over romantic landscape garden aesthetics.

The striking visual contrasts between architectonic and organic, geometric and curvilinear designs and elements—often considered as representing opposing philosophical stances—nevertheless mirrored political ideas. The progressive and—in the terminology of the Nazis—“degenerate” international style, with its symmetrical formal garden designs, attributed to an alleged Roman influence, was criticised by conservative proponents (see Willy Lange). They favoured naturalist style, using scientific findings from botany and phytosociology to express a special “Nordic” connection to nature, resulting in the nationalist-tainted Naturgarten—ideas by which the group of the Bornimers (Mattern, Foerster, Hammerbacher and colleagues) were likewise influenced. However, Mattern’s design approach was primarily determined by site-specific conditions rather than by rigid adherence to dogmatic ideals.

It may come as a surprise to contemporary readers just how awkward neo-classical architectonic gardens could appear, or how kitschy naturalistic designs sometimes became. It took some years for landscape architecture to transition toward more functional and relaxed forms. While the shift was well in place in the 1920s, exemplified by Leberecht Migge’s garden for Ernst May—emphasising practicality, health, and rejecting ornamental planting—the political climate soon changed. The progressives’ observation that “[t]he tightness of the Nordic cosiness yields southern joy of the corporeal in all forms of being” clashed sharply with “the coming garden” of conservatives, grounded in the nativist Blood and Soil ideology. Hopstock notes that these opposing concepts could successfully intermingle, merging symmetrical, architectonic forms with lush perennial plantings and rustic elements. The Bornim group developed a kind of organic functionalism that integrated the building and garden with more abstract framing and naturalistic planting—initially creating “a garden to live in,” slowly maturing into “a landscape to live in”.

Their designs flourished in the 1930s, and to maintain the momentum, Mattern, now alone, was allegedly coerced by the potential loss of work into cooperating with the party. Hopstock’s careful documentation of connections within Mattern’s circle to the Nazi party may seem excessive to some, yet these explorations effectively reveal the complexities and internal tensions shaping their identities and actions, resisting simplistic ideological categorisation. For Mattern specifically, it seems his artistic ego and intellectual independence were too strong for him to fully commit to any singular political alignment.

During the “Third Reich”, Mattern produced numerous significant public and private projects. The 1939 Reichsgartenschau at Stuttgart’s Killesberg Park—built upon reclaimed wasteland and visited by 4.5 million people just before WWII—remains one of his major achievements, keeping him in the grindmill of rivalries, opponents and praise. For the concept, Mattern employed the provocative theme of the “world garden” and successfully blended what critics derogatorily referred to as “feminine” naturalness with the stark, “masculine” monumentalism of Nazi architecture. The harsh critiques he received from his colleagues, exposing the design as “romanticism, which might be acceptable to ladies”, seem now unthinkable in the profession.

Simultaneously, Mattern’s frenetic activity extended to planning large parks, green spaces, and even a stadium in occupied Prague. He was appointed advisor to the Berlin Waterways Directorate. He traversed war-ravaged territories, greening autobahns and developing agricultural strategies, which are the most explicit examples of projects in direct “service of war”, facilitating mobility and food production for the frontline. Chilling as these realisations are, Mattern, in a way, distracted himself by turning towards an ecological approach as the heavy industrial and infrastructure measures were eating away and poisoning the landscape. In the aesthetisation of these projects, however, as Hopstock concludes, Mattern appeared elitist—positioning himself above the historical reality. While Mattern may have believed he was working for the benefit of society at large, Hopstock interprets this conviction as self-deception.

Somewhat unexpectedly, Mattern returned from a brief period of retreat disillusioned but reinvigorated, reopening his office and re-establishing his influence with notable force. Among his postwar achievements was the 1955 Kassel Garden Show, alongside numerous smaller commissions. He also assumed a key editorial role in Hilfe durch Grün, contributing to critical discussions on public green spaces and their role in postwar urban planning. In the shifting climate of “landscape rehabilitation”, Mattern’s ideas aligned with emerging ecological discourses and integrated scientific thinking into design. Exhibitions such as Tomorrow’s City showcased his evolving concept of a “landscape for living”:

“Biological coherencies in the landscape always relate to humankind, and they are also assessed exclusively by humans in reference to their effects on humankind itself”.

While ecological thinking in Germany often drew from patriotic or nationalist traditions, Hopstock notes Mattern’s distinct sensibility and situates his approach as conceptually progressive—aligned, from today’s perspective, with a proto-Green ethic. For Mattern, landscape was not to be preserved in stasis but understood as a dynamic system in constant interplay with life:

“Protection is always offered to weak situations only; protection—thus nature protection, too—is a negative activity”.

His prolific involvement in professional circles and contributions to planning and pedagogy secure his status as a pivotal figure in the development of postwar landscape architecture in Germany.

While not being particularly popular or in step with the times as a professor at the TU Berlin, the tenure he took up in 1961, when the new generation was already shifting towards postmodernist aesthetics, his contribution to landscape thinking and planning, influencing generations, is invaluable. Reading about Mattern’s approach to curriculum, it is probably not far from the truth to say that many of the educational systems in Europe today rely heavily on the legacy of the post-war generation.

Mattern’s undogmatic, independent thinking—shaped by contradictory influences and his capacity to navigate and integrate paradox—positions him as a progressive figure, arguably ahead of his time. While Lars Hopstock challenges the often uncritical portrayal of Mattern as a liberal character by contextualising his career within the framework of the Nazi regime, he leaves room for interpretation of his work and gives Mattern a deserving spot among the 20th-century influential creators. To conclude, Hopstock distils Mattern’s personal beliefs, key traits and intellectual force undergirding his work. For Mattern, freedom was paramount, from allowing a plant to express its character fully, to acknowledging limitations such as garden walls (or perhaps constraints of the regime) to be “enforced conditions” producing “open space” in which the sky is the ultimate reference point of freedom.

Expanding the scope of landscape architecture historiography, Hopstock draws on literature, philosophy, and contemporary intellectual currents, thereby demonstrating the urgent need for deeper critical inquiry into the field. His work signals a call for further research that addresses not only aesthetic expressions and artistic capabilities of landscape architecture to better assert itself, but also the political entanglements, colonial legacies, and hidden wounds ingrained in the profession’s development, which all contribute to the evolving relationship with the landscape.

Q&A with Lars Hopstock

What did Germany specifically (historically) bring to landscape architecture and garden design, as opposed to the Italian Renaissance, the French Baroque, or the English Garden?

What strikes me about the 19th and 20th centuries is less national specificity—especially given that Germany became a nation-state only in 1871—than the intensity of international exchange. German garden designers flocked to Paris to train with André Thouin at the Jardin des Plantes; cross-border internships were common long before formal training institutes emerged in Prussia or Bavaria. Already in earlier centuries, Germans adapted models they saw abroad in a creative way.

That said, specifically German tendencies exist and can be seen in transitional periods that are often deemed “in-between” but in fact have their own identity. Rococo gardens, for instance, formed peculiar, allegorically charged realms of aesthetic experience. Many 18th-century gardens hybridised baroque or rococo elements with emerging landscape ideals, as in Schwetzingen. Then, the English model was re-coded in German contexts, often as landscape shaped to embody Enlightenment ideals and to promote civic and moral education—see Goethe’s involvement at Weimar—or even as a medium for state-theoretical reform ideas, if we think of Wörlitz. Recently, I spoke about this question to Iris Lauterbach, one of the few German art historians specialised in garden history, who stressed the diversity and individuality of gardens during the early modern period in the many different German principalities with their different topographies, as well as the importance and wealth of plant and animal collections that German princes accumulated; Furthermore the publication of German Botanists were instrumental for the dissemination of scientific botany since the 16th century.

What about the late modern period? There are so many topics addressed in your book that seem to be connected to a German context; the aesthetics of planting design, to name one example. 

First, I would mention the field of education which played a distinctive role from the early 19th century onward. The Lehranstalten für Gartenbau, founded in Bavaria, Prussia and Saxony integrated artistic and scientific instruction in ways that seem to have been quite advanced compared to other countries. At about the same time, Germany was also pioneering the people’s park as urban space and public sphere.

In the 20th century, themes with particular resonance in Germany include the link between garden design, health culture, and the body, as well as the influence of soil and vegetation science—notably geo-ecology and Reinhold Tüxen’s phytosociology. These scientific developments, though not exclusively German, were taken up within a broader cultural leaning towards holistic thinking, in which science, aesthetics, and reform ideals were closely intertwined. Designers like Mattern or Karl Plomin, though committed to an artistic self-conception, absorbed scientific ideas intuitively—without aligning themselves with a scientific method. At the same time, Willy Lange’s “physiognomic” theory was crucial in promoting new, naturalistic ideas for plant composition. Berthold Körting’s work from the 1920s—still underexplored but briefly discussed in my book—helped redefine aesthetics in this regard, and Karl Foerster championed a new plant vocabulary from around 1910 with a shift toward smaller perennials, alpine species, grasses and ferns. All this led to new visual languages. In Mattern’s and Hammerbacher’s work, such shifts are connected with a modern search for informal, “free” dwelling in the garden.

What about the German specificity of problematic concepts you address, such as “the organic”?

Yes, that’s quite a dominant aspect in the book. If we want to speak about a specifically German contribution, I think we must also reflect on how national narratives shaped values. Twentieth-century German discourse often celebrated the “irrational”, the “organic”, and a supposed poetic sensitivity to nature—set in contrast to the alleged “soullessness” of Jews, Slavs or “Latin” southerners. Willy Lange, as shown by Gert Gröning and Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn, was strongly grounded in this thinking. I write a bit about it regarding Expressionism, but we find this thinking in so many fields, like in Gestalt theory, for example. And it was sometimes weaponised against democracy, seen as a technocratic system that flattened social differences. Karl Foerster, for instance, linked such views to eugenic ideals, as Clemens Alexander Wimmer only recently documented more fully.

Yet not everyone who drew on the subconscious or the “organic” was reactionary; this would lead to a reductive understanding of “Modernism”—a term I tend to avoid as I think it is actually not very helpful. There were also progressive Romantics, so to speak. Mattern’s ambiguity is part of what makes him so compelling, which is why the subsection in one chapter is titled—somewhat clumsily—“The rational and the irrational Mattern”. Had his work aligned more clearly with problematic ideology, the book would look different.

Is the garden in the recent and well-acclaimed movie The Zone of Interest “true to the style”, how would you contextualise it, and the idyll of the landscape in the opening scene? What would Mattern say about it?

The watchtower is in plain view … I hope you understand that I wish not to discuss the design of that specific garden here, even if you have a point if we consider Mattern’s proximity—professionally and possibly spatially—to these atrocities. The film’s essence lies in how ordinary the evil appeared from the outside. The landscape scene you are referring to opens the film with a familiar, peaceful riverside gathering. It forms a stark contrast to what follows later: riverwater brings the unspeakable violence to light, as wastewater from the crematoria is dumped the moment Höss stands in the middle of the stream fishing, his children playing nearby. Addressing landscape as a concept in those days, the first thing one must recall is that National Socialist ideology had at its core a claim of a unique German relationship to landscape. This makes it crucial to examine what beliefs inform appeals to an “organic” relation to landscape. Mattern voiced convincingly progressive, non-völkisch views, at least after the war. But is it ethically less problematic to collaborate without conviction than to act as a true believer?

Mattern’s compelling personality prompted an initial sense of engagement, which made the gradual uncovering of his opportunism under National Socialism a sobering process. For decades, we were told he was a humanist, pacifist, and democrat. Intriguingly, my relationship to my own book is still evolving—which I realised when preparing public book presentations. There are a few lines in the early part on Mattern’s youth that are sort of relics from the original PhD thesis text, completed at the University of Sheffield in 2015, that I would write differently today. Generally, I believe that I treated his biography with appropriate dispassion, but it is for reviewers to judge if I succeeded. My perspective may still change, especially as many details remain unknown. But that’s the nature of historical research.

To be honest, I never quite shook a certain unease while addressing garden aesthetics under Nazism, even though I consciously gave aesthetics much space. I circle the question of modernity, of what Mattern and Hammerbacher saw as such, and show the extreme seriousness with which formal debates were conducted. Take, for example, Gudmundt Nyeland Brandt’s 1940 review of Mattern’s Killesberg design, where he writes that the general expectation dictates that moving water belongs in organic form, still water in geometric—and praises Mattern for inverting that convention (see the photo). Such normative thinking in design is unimaginable today. Yet, historical discourse on form aesthetics in those years has received little attention in garden literature.

Your book opens quite a panorama; it is more than one might expect from a biography.

I deliberately chose to give the book a broad thematic scope: Mattern’s biography served, to some extent, as a vehicle to explore the wider cultural and historical dimensions of twentieth-century landscape architecture and to open up a broader understanding of what the profession can be. The latter is of particular relevance today, as there is a worrying trend in Germany: universities are downsizing landscape departments, with key positions being filled at the expense of disciplinary expertise in landscape architecture and landscape planning. You are obviously aiming at the same thing with Landezine, which is really applaudable! You are showing the relevance of landscape architecture in a very accessible way. I hope to be doing the same with my means.