A Brief Stop On the Road From Auschwitz Read Online Free PDF Page A

auxiliary red-brick accommodations for its employees; sixteen new, three-story housing blocks in yellow or gray plaster lining both sides of a stone-paved avenue; some smaller side streets with two-story detached houses; an open square; two playgrounds; a day nursery and a post office; two grocery shops, Kling’s with cooling water running in the window, and the Co-op with the first frozen-food counter; a tobacconist’s; a haberdasher’s; a bakery and a cafe. In front of the train station, there’s a newspaper kiosk and a telephone boothwith a removable floor of wooden laths through which escaped ten-öre coins lie glinting. It’s a perfectly enclosed, idyllic world, which you can enter or exit only by passing under dark railroad viaducts, balancing across vertiginous railroad bridges, climbing over prohibited embankments, jumping on treacherous ice floes, or making holes in skull-marked factory fences.
    On the other hand, it’s a place that can easily be explored and taken possession of. Not only because it’s so small and so circumscribed, but also because it’s so new. In fact, it’s practically without a history. Not long ago, there were no people here at all, just pine forest and sandy heath. Not long ago, there was no railroad passing through here and there were no plans for one to do so. Not long ago, the intention was to put something else here, something grander and more visionary. Not long ago, the idea was for these unchartered backwoods to be the site of an ideal society, meticulously planned in every detail. “The forested area of Näset to the south of the city” was to become a workers’ paradise of self-owned homes, adjoining one-family houses, each with its own patch of garden, an esplanade punctuated with parks and hills, a square with a covered market, public baths, a church on a slight rise, a public park and sports area down by the factories, and a bathing beach, Havsbadet, by the sea.
    Only much later did I learn that the place where I applied my first words to the world is a wrecked planners’ dream.
    The name of the architect behind the dream was Per Olof Hallman, and the dream was inspired by a social movement that sought to replace the rectilinear, antinature urban ideal of the industrial age with something more organic, more in tune with the natural world. The town plan was to be adapted to thelandscape, and not the other way around. Streets were to be built around or over rises and hills, not blasted through them. Existing natural conditions were to be exploited, not obliterated. “A town planner unfamiliar with the terrain can all but ruin a place with a few strokes of the pen,” Hallman wrote in 1901. Two years later, he put forward his plan “for the disused land to the south of, and belonging to, the town of Södertelge.”
    Hallman’s ambitions, and indeed those of the whole movement, were far-reaching. The people involved wanted to plan away the disadvantages of industrialization, the dirt, the overcrowding, the ravaging of the countryside, the social injustices, and to plan forth its hidden potential: a freer and more equal society, closer to nature. One of the movement’s leading proponents was Camillo Sitte, an Austrian who wanted to re-create the human community of the medieval town, with its winding alleys and irregular squares. Another was the Englishman Ebenezer Howard, who wanted to forge a new connection between country and town, between agriculture and industry, gardens and backyards. Bulging metropolises would be decentralized and green, and airy garden cities would be built in surrounding rural areas. A bit of forward-thinking town planning would enable the tenement blocks of industrialization to be peacefully torn down and a new and better society to be peacefully built. Ebenezer Howard was the author of
Tomorrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform
, a book which Per Olof Hallman had undoubtedly read before he brought his draftsman’s pen to bear on the southern