The futurist devoted his life to promoting a scheme that would see the building of vast hydroelectric dams spanning the Mediterranean Sea.
Global friction today would have been greatly reduced had one man’s vision not been swept aside by World War Two. Such was his ambition that the geographical shape of the Mediterranean coastlines, seen in today’s atlases, would have been quite unfamiliar to us.
Few have heard of Herman Sörgel. Although he was hardly the first to champion a united and prosperous Europe he was certainly the most recent and peaceful.
Born in Regensburg, Germany in 1885, this Great War pacifist experienced at first hand a continent destroyed by the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse; conquest, war, famine and death.
This talented German architect endured the epicentre of Europe’s disaster. His was a nation impoverished under the notoriously harsh terms of the victor nations’ Versailles Treaty. Post First World War Europe was an exhausted continent, caught in the vice of expansionist Communism to the east and dollar imperialism to the west.
The New Roman Empire
It was Europe’s desperate plight and vulnerability that inspired Sörgel to a visionary concept, which he named Atlantropa. His was a grand plan that would create a Europe equal in wealth, power and influence to that of the Roman Empire.
One of the great ironies of history was that the same hardships that stirred him also inspired Adolf Hitler. The German leader rejected Sörgel’s concept. This was due to his reluctance to make Germany dependant upon other nations collaborating in the project. Italy was less than enthusiastic as many of its affected cities were dependent upon the nation’s coastlines.
The theory was based on the different sea levels of the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea. The concept once completed would increase the dry land areas thus narrowing the sea that separates Europe from Africa.
From there on the futurist devoted his life to promoting a scheme that would see the building of vast hydroelectric dams spanning the Mediterranean Sea. He believed their massive turbines, driven by pressure from the Atlantic Ocean, would provide Europe with a surplus of power.
The consequence would be to turn the arid North African landscapes, the Sahara too, into wetlands, which would then provide unlimited produce. As a food provider the most northerly regions of the African continent would become fertile and very much as Mediterranean Spain is today but on a far grander scale.
The creative thinker was no eccentric; Herman Sörgel attracted the attention and support of many who shared his vision for a self-sufficient European super state. At the time there was real European fear of the power and influence wielded by the aggressive American and pan-Asian economies; in the case of the latter the spread of revolutionary Communism.
The First Green Solution
Cheap, exploitable and renewable hydroelectric power was the first great green revolution. It would make Europe self-sufficient in power. Herman Sörgel was contemptuous of the comparatively puny power then being sourced from dammed rivers. His plans in magnitude equalled the exploration of space but at far less cost. He was not alone in believing that the salvation of Europe, the guarantor of its prosperity and security, was to master and harness the enormous natural power of the Mediterranean Sea.
His far-sighted project proposed building an eighteen-mile long dam spanning the straits of Gibraltar. A second dam would halt the Bosporus by blocking the Black Sea. Of course many rivers feed the Mediterranean but most of it flows in from the Atlantic Ocean. Water pushing through the turbines would create sufficient power to provide for the needs of both Europe and Africa.
90,000 Square Miles of New Land
Simultaneously the tidal control wielded by the dams would lower the level of the Mediterranean by 100 metres; thus 90,000 square miles of new land would be the result. The seabed between Sicily and Italy would become dry land, and a third dam between Sicily and Tunisia would also serve as a bridge, allowing for easier access to Africa’s resources.
Herman Sörgel articulated his vision through four books, thousands of publications and countless lectures. From the massive supply of electricity a score of nations that make up modern Europe would become inter-dependent of power from a single-grid thereby reducing tensions. American hegemony, much of it based on the petro-dollar colonisation of the Middle East, would have been much reduced.
Interestingly Europe is still squeezed between Russia and America. What was once Soviet Communism is now Russian nationalism; what was once American oil imperialism remains so. Had Europe’s dependence upon the natural resources of the Russian Federation been less today a major cause of international friction would have been avoided.
The Strange Death of a Visionary
Herman Sörgel reasoned that the project would also curb the lust for war by freeing up living space and providing employment for one-hundred years. It would allow the densely packed northern European peoples to expand southwards whilst bringing prosperity to North Africa. This was a period when colonisation was viewed not only as acceptable but to the benefit of colonised peoples.
For all of his popularity the project never moved off the design desks. His Atlantropa Institute survived the Second World War but gradually lost most of its funding.
Sörgel never gave up on his dream. He passionately pushed on with it until Christmas Day 1952. Riding his bicycle along a perfectly straight and clear road near Munich on his way to an important meeting he was mown down by a hit and run motorist, whose identity was never revealed.
Interestingly it was a carbon copy ‘accident’ of twenty-five years earlier when another European visionary; T.E Lawrence (of Arabia) lost his life in exactly the same circumstances.
This most iconic of English figures; a national hero still, had been on his way to a meeting. There he had intended to declare his support for Oswald Mosley British Union of Fascists campaign to keep Britain out of the war. Such was Lawrence’s international standing that the pro-war lobby would have almost certainly been thwarted and the Second World War avoided.
In 1960 the Atlantropa Institute was dissolved. Today as never before, access to energy heightens world tensions. To Herman Sörgel it never had to be that way.
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