Atlantropa: the German project to drain the Mediterranean
A crazy geoengineering project to drain the sea and merge two continents into one.
The German architect Herman Sörgel, who lived at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, had a great project, to which he dedicated his entire life. He spoke of it for the first time in 1929, in his book Mittelmeer-Senkung, saharabewässerung, Panropaprojekt, where the Panropaprojekt consisted, essentially, in eliminating the Mediterranean Sea from the geographical maps, draining the basin and conquering new habitable land for the European peoples.
Sörgel was so convinced of the goodness of his project that he defended it in a remarkable production of books, articles, lectures, and public interventions. To put Atlantropa into practice — the title of his second book and the name by which his theories became famous — Sörgel proposed closing the Strait of Gibraltar with an enormous dam, larger than any existing infrastructure (including the colossal Three gorges in Hubei in China, 185 meters high), and combine it with a second intervention on the Dardanelles to exclude the Black Sea from the Mediterranean basin, and a third capable of uniting Sicily to Tunisia, creating two different sea levels on the two sides of the dam.
For the architect of the 1920s, the benefits of such a colossal undertaking were manifold: it could have created work for the distrustful masses of the first postwar period and added new, large arable land, and such daring engineering works would also have brought much, very much hydroelectric energy. Sörgel also founded an Atlantropa Institute that was active until the 1960s, but when he died in 1952, no one had given him any signs of wanting to invest in his project: world powers were more interested in nuclear power than in hydroelectricity. Even the Nazis, despite being voted in search of lebensraum for their self-styled German people, branded the initiative as impossible to put into practice.
Sörge is convinced that only alternative energy sources to fossil fuels can prevent serious economic crises, which inevitably lead to internal social conflicts and between nations. His was a pan-European project, which should have changed the socio-political order of the old continent, with the creation of a new super-continent.
A technological leap that would have provided not only new habitable and arable land, an inexhaustible clean and renewable electricity guaranteed by numerous dams, but also the creation of a united Europe, socially and culturally more advanced thanks to technological changes.
Sörgel had a stroke of genius in 1927 when he reads that the level of the Mediterranean is kept constant by the flow of water from the Atlantic Ocean through the Strait of Gibraltar. So why not build a gigantic barrage between Africa and Spain, and two smaller ones in the Dardanelles Strait and at the mouth of the Nile, to isolate the Mediterranean basin? In this way, the water level would have dropped due to evaporation, leaving large tracts of land uncovered. Large hydroelectric plants on the dams would have guaranteed an enormous amount of energy.
Atlantropa is therefore a trans-national project, «a new form of life for Europe», thanks to which cooperation between the various states would have removed the possibility of a new war. Not to mention that a new super-continent would have rebalanced the world situation: Asia, America and Atlantropa would have been continents on a par, while Europe alone would not have had sufficient energy resources.
In Sörgel’s vision the lack of energy leads to cultural impoverishment:
«If Europe does not want to be overtaken by other continents, it must develop its only major source of energy, namely the Mediterranean — promptly» so as not to run the risk of «even the cultural center of Europe disappearing. Europe would become desolate»
The utopia of Atlantropa to contrast the dystopia of the future. To fight the predictable generalized decay of the Old Continent, it is necessary to widen its borders: this is the concept of Lebensraum, which later became fundamental in Nazi ideology.
With this in mind, Sörgel further broadens his horizons and studies a way to drastically change the climate of Africa. A dam on the Congo River and the formation of large lakes in Central Africa would have made the Sahara fertile: total trust in technology as an antidote to governments’ inability to find solutions to European problems. However, the futuristic pan-European project did not get rid of the imperialist ideology that was dominant at the time: the fate of the populations of Congo did not concern Sörgel, or rather, the architect made the consideration that without that work «(…) blacks would increase, until they have eaten all that the earth can produce (…)».
What is astonishing today is the fact that at the time no one raised doubts about the technical feasibility of the project, but rather about the possible environmental and climatic consequences, and even more about the political difficulty of its implementation: cooperation between European states, yes, it was a utopia. However, many were convinced that, sooner or later, Atlantropa would be born. Writer Eugen Diesel stated:
«There is no doubt that sooner or later humanity will launch and implement projects like Atlantropa. Atlantropa is therefore not utopian but responds to an inexorable course of development. »
In 1933, when Hitler came to power in Germany, that transnational project was certainly not in his strings. Sörgel adjusts and seeks the approval of the Fuhrer and Mussolini (who had shown «great interest» in the project), inviting them to consider their respective countries, Greater Germany and the Italian Empire, as «the womb of Atlantropa».
However, Germany is more interested in expanding to the east than to the south. Sörgel’s vision (pacifism and European cooperation) cannot find consensus among the Nazis, so much so that in 1942 the Ministry of Propaganda forbids the dissemination of his writings.
Sörgel, however, is patient and at the end of the war he returns to the office, so much so that his project continues to be talked about for years, perhaps revised and corrected in slightly less racist terms the more attentive to the alleged advantages of climate change in the Sahara.
The dream of Atlantropa, however, ends, perhaps more than for the insurmountable technical problems and the disastrous environmental consequences, because it reflects that blind faith in technology — typical of the period between the two wars — considered the force capable of resolving socio-political and cultural conflicts in an imperialist, racist context and subject to authoritarian governments.
The German architect continues to believe in his dream throughout his life: he writes books, publishes articles in magazines, and organizes conferences, until, on the evening of December 4, 1952, a car hits him while he is cycling to the University of Munich, just to give a lecture.
The idea of the super-continent practically dies with him, even if the Atlantropa Institute will close its doors only in 1958: «an outdated project» will be the words that put an end to Herman Sörgel’s utopia.
