List of German utopian communities

Based on David Ricardo's law of rent, English Chartists argued that private land ownership was the cause of urban poverty.

The Austrian Theodor Hertzka published the utopian novel Freiland, ein soziales Zukunftsbild in 1889, promoting emigration to the "empty" New World.

Both agreed that it was possible to overcome capitalism not through political conquest but by cooperative economic subversion which they claimed would naturally lead to social justice.

He also influenced Theodor Herzl, author of the founding document of Zionism, Der Judenstaat, published as a direct reply to Oppenheimer in his 1902 Altneuland.

In 1886 the Prussian Settlement Commission was created in West Prussia and Posen motivated by racist beliefs to increase the Germanization of former Polish territories.

[10] The Commission oversaw developing administrative infrastructure for interior colonization in the German Reich such as centers of counseling, pension banks, cooperatives and private settlement companies like the Pommersche Ansiedlungsgesellschaft(1903) and Ostpreußische Landgesellschaft(1905).

The Drang nach Osten became a core principle of Nazi Germany expressed through the slogan "Blood and soil" and tied to the belief that the German people were to expand their Lebensraum into eastern Europe, conquering and displacing the native Slavic and Baltic population via Generalplan Ost.

Ulrich Linse separates the spectrum of settlement attempts into a social reform period and lebensreformische (1900–1914/18), freideutsch-bündische (1918–1923) and bündisch-jugendbewegte (1923-1933) phases.

[24] Georg Becker names religious and religious-socialist (Habertshof, Bruderhof, Neusonnenfeld, Vogelhof), anti-semitic völkisch (Donnershag), communist (Barkenhof) and anarcho-syndicalist (Freie Erde) communes.

[26] Most scholars agree that settlements were short-lived due to economic difficulties, lack of agricultural training and ideological quarrels within groups.

Wedemeyer-Kolwe points out that this also adequately reflects the self-perception of those involved in the 19th century reform movements, who thought themselves "rational, modern and progressive".

[31] According to another fringe interpretation presented by Barlösius[32] and Wedemeyer-Kolwe, the reform movements allowed members of a newly developing middle class to assimilate themselves into and absorb the former bourgeois lifestyle and values, which became the new mainstream in the early 20th century.