In the 1920's the people of Europe feared the future as a dark, despairing place. Despite the loss of over five million Europeans in the Great War, the region was still plagued with the social maladies which had led to the conflict. The humans were maladjusted to the Industrial Age and the changes in labor which it spawned. To make matters worse, both scholars and soothsayers of the day postulated that world's fluxing economies would congeal into two economic blobs: the Americas would unify into a wealthy super-state in the west, while the east colluded to become an enormous pan-Asian power. Europe would be left economically isolated, with a limited range of climates for farming and fewer resources at hand. Nowhere was the gloom thicker than in Germany where the terms of the Treaty of Versailles led to poverty and hunger for much of the population. It was in the midst of that dark time that an architect named Herman Sörgel devised a plan to preserve Europe through this daunting new worldscape.
Sörgel spent years promoting his scheme to save Europe: the construction of vast hydroelectric dams spanning the Mediterranean. The massive turbines would furnish a surplus of power, and the re-engineered sea would turn the life-hostile Sahara desert into a fertile wetland. In an era when it seemed technology could do no wrong, a considerable segment of the population supported Sörgel's ambitious plan.
Herman Sörgel was born 2 April 1885 in Regensburg, Germany. Just after the turn of the century Sörgel began studying architecture in Munich. He submitted his doctoral thesis in 1908, but it was rejected. Five years later he turned in a fantastically similar paper. This time it was accepted, and so well received that Sörgel successfully expanded it into a book. From such events Sörgel learned a valuable lesson of persistence–it was a lesson that served him well though the rest of his life. He was working as an architect and journalist in 1914 when World War I broke out across Europe. His country engaged in hostilities, but Sörgel professed himself a pacifist, and did not participate. In the aftermath of the First War to End All Wars, Sörgel looked around at war-ravaged Germany, and worried for the future. Not just his future, nor his country’s. Sörgel worried for all of Europe. The forecasted Super-America and Pan-Asia economies prompted more fear: since the Americas spanned all the latitudes and climates, they would always be able to farm, and would eradicate hunger. With their legendary abundance of resources, the Super-America would need import nothing from Europe. The predicted Pan-Asian union presented the same problem with a distinctly oriental lilt. Europe would be helplessly sandwiched between these two behemoths–small, underfed, and under-powered.
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