Ernst May and the Campaign to Resettle the Countryside: Rural Housing in Silesia, 1919-1925

In 1919 Ernst May became the head of rural housing for the province of Silesia in eastern Germany. Silesian agriculture had long suffered from rural flight. The situation worsened in 1922 when the partition brokered by the Allies brought chaos in the mining industry and a flood of refugees. As head of the provincial stabilization effort called interior colonization, May was in charge of settlement programs to aid three constituencies of special concern: the farmworkers, the miners, and the refugees. Between 1919 and 1923, Germany's national rural housing effort employed a contradictory strategy of modernization set within corporative ideology, a "third way" that trumpeted a quasi-feudal social order as a path to political accord. May's Silesian work chronicles the impact of Modernism and corporatism on early Weimar housing: his settlements for farmworkers and miners celebrated their unique cultural traditions, while he experimented in rationalization techniques to increase housing production and reduce costs. With corporatism's decline after Germany's return to economic stability in 1924, modernization was increasingly accepted as an unalloyed virtue, and the veil of corporatism lifted. In 1924, challenged by the circumstances of the refugee housing program just at the moment the corporative compromise came to an end, May engaged in a series of experiments in polychromy, prefabricated construction, mass production, and standardization that reflected a more purely modern approach to the housing problem.