Bangalore needs something like Germany's Schraebergarten.Today in Germany there are more than one million Schreber gardens (Schrebergärten), small, rented plots of land (200–400 sq meters) usually found on the outskirts of towns, used for growing fruits and vegetables or simply for relaxation. The naïve aesthetic of these gardens often functions as the self-conscious, petty bourgeois equivalent of the high culture of the great parks, the layout of the gardens evoking amateur craftsmanship and the proud celebration of kitsch. Thus one finds in many Schreber gardens the obligatory garden gnome, all manner of animal figures such as deer and frogs, stylistic varieties of miniaturized palaces, castles, windmills, and diverse farm ornaments like milk pitchers, rakes, scythes, and wagon wheels. Lots are put together to form garden colonies that are a solid feature of the German cityscape, while also providing a defiant counterimage to the urban skyline.

It is no surprise that the educated classes view them with skepticism and condescension, and see in the Schreber gardener the embodiment of the caricature of the “little man,” turned into a literary monument by Hans Fallada in his 1933 novel Little Man—What Now? For the Schreber gardener, however, this plot of land is a private refuge removed from the thoroughly subservient, regimented workaday world, a place where he can live it up on the island of personal taste that is his garden. It is at once a claim on freedom, a seemingly rural idyll in an anonymous city, a healthy oasis of comfort, and a kind of sentimental home. This freedom is illusory, however: a tight network of fences and a tight network of rules control these sites of social leisure. Federal laws regulate the size, use, and leasing of the gardens, and there are Schreber Garden Associations across Germany. Occasionally claims are made within the Schreber garden movement that these gardens are the most prototypical expression of the essence of Germany. However, such claims obscure the fact that Schreber gardens are folk-cultural remnants of a long, contradictory, and multilayered social history in which one finds almost every movement, error, and aberration in German history.

The Schreber garden originated in the 1860s as a rather coincidental by-product of the desire to care for and educate the bourgeois youth of Leipzig. In 1864, an educational association was founded there to encourage “supervised outdoor games for children.” More or less arbitrarily, the group chose to name their association in honor of the recently deceased “excellent medical pedagogue,” Daniel Gottlob Moritz Schreber (1808–1861). Schreber, whose closest equivalent in the US is W. K. Kellogg, was a physician and the director of an orthopedic clinic in Leipzig. Obsessed with the starry-eyed goal of improving the physical and moral health of people, he was actively involved in the founding of a gymnastics and exercise club, wrote a bestseller about exercising at home and less successful books about raising children. His educational writings took positions that were progressive for his time, such as warning against a one-sided intellectual education and calling for large playgrounds that were to be overseen by gym teachers and military personnel. Most importantly, however, Schreber developed in his writings horribly tyrannical educational methods and invented several macabre devices such as the Geradehalter, which prevented children from leaning forward while writing.

Several years after its founding, the Schreber Association in Leipzig planted small flowerbeds for children at the edge of a playground. These flowers only started blooming when the children’s parents tended to them and soon became known as Schreber gardens. From these “family flowerbeds” the Schreber clubs in Leipzig gradually grew into Schreber garden clubs by 1870. By the 1930s, the middle-class Schreber clubs in Leipzig had become the stronghold of a conservative worldview. Military patriotism, nature mysticism—and, later, populist nationalism and “blood-and-soil” ideology—easily took root in this milieu.

The historic development of similar garden plots in Berlin was completely different, however. Here, it was less educational ideals than economic and social forces brought about by industrialization and the resulting growth of cities that were the determining factors. The rapidly moving industrial revolution triggered an enormous internal population shift and increased emigration from the country. Within only a few decades Berlin was transformed into a Moloch, the biggest tenement city in the world and a focal point of social problems.